Trivia of Gloria Stuart

 Trivia of Gloria Stuart (4 July 1910 - 26 September 2010)

*Gloria Stuart was born on a dining room table on 4th Street in Santa Monica, California on July 4, 1910. Her early roles as a performing artist were in plays she produced in her home as a young girl. She was the star of her senior class play at Santa Monica High School in 1927. Attending the University of California, at Berkeley, she continued to perform on the stage.

*Her Hollywood career began after talent scouts for both Paramount and Universal saw her perform in Pasadena Playhouse in 1932. In a famous dispute, the heads of the two studios flipped a coin and Universal won. Then, she played lead roles for director James Whale, including The Old Dark House (1932) opposite Boris Karloff.During the production Gloria Stuart was rather dismissive of the British members of the cast, regarding them as "aloof" and "snooty." Indeed, she remarked that Boris Karloff was the most unpleasant of them all, spurring unnecessary rows with James Whale which delayed production for hours when Whale refused to return to the set. She would later refer to Karloff as "guileful" and "self-absorbed."

*Gloria Stuart, who had worked with Whale in The Old Dark House and The Kiss Before the Mirror acted in the role of Flora Cranley in movie The Invisible (1933).Stuart reflected on working with actor Claude Rains and found him to be difficult, saying: "He was molto difficile, he was an 'actor's actor' and he didn't really give".

*She appeared in Shirley Temple's movies : Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).She almost turned down Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) because she felt that the material was not to her dramatic acting abilities; however, producer Darryl F. Zanuck forced her to do the picture, and explained that she would be seen by millions, due to little Shirley Temple's popularity.

*Beginning in 1940, Stuart slowed her film career, instead performing in regional theater in New England.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.

*Titanic (1997) was her third film that featured a doomed ship. One of her early films, Here Comes the Navy (1934), was filmed aboard the USS Arizona. The other was Girl Overboard (1937).

*She was the only cast member of Titanic (1997) who was alive at the time of the actual disaster. Stuart lived to be 100 years old, the same age as her character in the film.