Gloria Frances Stuart (born Gloria Stewart; July 4, 1910 – September 26, 2010) was an American actress, visual artist and activist. She was known for her roles in pre-code films, and garnered renewed fame late in life for her portrayal of Rose Dawson Calvert in James Cameron's epic romance Titanic (1997), one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Her performance in the film won her a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role and earned her nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture.
A native of Santa Monica, California, Stuart began acting while in high school. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, she embarked on a career in theater, performing in local productions and summer stock in Los Angeles and New York City. She signed a film contract with Universal Pictures in 1932, and acted in numerous films for the studio, including the horror films The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933), followed by roles in the Shirley Temple musicals Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). She also starred as Queen Anne of Austria in the musical comedy The Three Musketeers (1939).
Beginning in 1940, Stuart slowed her film career, instead performing in regional theater in New England. In 1945, following a tenure as a contract player for Twentieth Century Fox, Stuart abandoned her acting career and shifted to a career as an artist, working as a fine printer and making paintings, serigraphy, miniature books, Bonsai, and découpage for the next three decades. She produced numerous pieces during this period, many of which are part of collections in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stuart gradually returned to acting in the late 1970s, appearing in several bit parts, including in Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year (1982) and Wildcats (1986). She made a prominent return to mainstream cinema at age 86 when she was cast as the 100-year-old elder Rose Dawson Calvert in Titanic (1997), which earned her numerous accolades and renewed attention. Her final film performance was in Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty (2004).
In addition to her acting and art careers, Stuart was a lifelong environmental and political activist, who served as a co-founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
Biography
1910–1929: Early life
left|thumb|259x259px|Stuart beside her brother, Frank Jr., and father,
Stuart was born Gloria Stewart at 11:00 p.m. on the Fourth of July, 1910 on the family's kitchen table in Santa Monica, California, the first child of Alice (née Deidrick) and Frank Stewart. Through her mother, Stuart was a third-generation Californian; Stuart's maternal grandmother, Alice Vaughan, was born in 1854 in Angels Camp, gold country, two years after her own mother, Berilla (Stuart's great-grandmother), relocated to California from Missouri in a covered wagon. Her maternal grandfather, William Deidrick, was a farmer to whom the invention of the Deidrick Scraper is partially attributed. Stuart's father, a native of The Dalles, Oregon, was of Scottish descent, and studied law in San Francisco. At the time of her birth, he was an attorney representing The Six Companies. Stuart had one younger brother, Frank Jr., born eleven months later. Another younger brother Thomas was born two years after Frank Jr.; however, he died due to spinal meningitis at age three.
As a child, Stuart attended a Church of Christ with her mother, and subsequently attended a Catholic school. Her father, originally a Presbyterian, converted to Christian Science during her childhood. When Stuart was nine years old, her father died as the result of an infection from an injury sustained when an automobile grazed his leg. She was also expelled from grade school after kicking her teacher ("to be honest, she deserved it", she recalled). Hard-pressed to support two small children, her mother soon accepted the proposal of local businessman Fred J. Finch.
Stuart attended her schooling using the name Gloria Fae Finch. She had not been given a middle name by her parents and so adopted one, Frances, the feminine of Frank, her father's name.
thumb|right|Stuart as high school senior, 1927
Stuart attended Santa Monica High School, where she was active in theater and performed the lead role in her senior class play, The Swan. contributed to the campus literary journal, Occident, and posed as an artist's model. It was at Berkeley that she began signing her name Gloria Stuart.