Gloria Stuart
Gloria Frances Stuart 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, 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 and The Invisible Man, followed by roles in the Shirley Temple musicals Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She also starred as Queen Anne of Austria in the musical comedy The Three Musketeers.
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 and Wildcats. 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, which earned her numerous accolades and renewed attention. Her final film performance was in Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty.
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
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 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, 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 ; 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. 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.
Stuart attended Santa Monica High School, where she was active in theater and performed the lead role in her senior class play, The Swan. She loved writing as much as acting and spent her last two summers in high school taking short story and poetry writing classes and working as a cub reporter for the Santa Monica Outlook.
While a teenager, she had a tumultuous relationship with her stepfather and sought to attend college in order to leave home. After high school, Stuart enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy and drama. In college, she appeared in plays, worked on the Daily Californian, 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.
While a student at UC Berkeley, Stuart wanted to join the Young Communist League. She wrote, "I was told it was for the poor and the oppressed. That appealed to me. But membership wasn't open to anyone under eighteen, so I couldn't join." In Carmel, she notes that her friendship with muckraker Lincoln Steffens gave her "... much deeper insight into the abuses of laborers and blue-collar workers and made me ready to work for liberal causes when I got to Hollywood a few years later."
At the end of her junior year, in June 1930, Stuart married Blair Gordon Newell, a young sculptor who apprenticed with Ralph Stackpole on the facade of the San Francisco Stock Exchange building. The Newells moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea where there was a stimulating community of artists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Robinson Jeffers and Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. In Carmel-by-the-Sea, Stuart performed in productions at the Theatre of the Golden Bough and worked as a staff member on The Carmelite newspaper. She meanwhile made hand-sewn aprons, patchwork pillows and tea linens, and created bouquets of dried flowers for a tea shop, in which she also worked as a waitress. Newell laid brick, chopped and stacked wood, taught sculpture and woodworking, and managed a miniature golf course. They lived in a shack in the middle of a wood yard as night watchmen. Stuart would later reflect on this period of her life as "wonderfully bohemian."
1930–1934: Theatre and early films
Stuart's performance in the theatre in Carmel brought her to the attention of Gilmor Brown's private theater, The Playbox, in Pasadena. She was invited there to appear as Masha in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Opening night, casting directors from Paramount and Universal were in the audience. Both came backstage to arrange a screen test, both studios claimed her. Finally the studios flipped a coin and Universal won the toss. Stuart considered herself a serious actress in theater, but she and Newell "were stony broke, living hand to mouth" so she decided to sign the contract with Universal, which paid a bit more than Paramount.According to Stuart, she began her film career by playing an ingénue confronting her father's mistress in the Warner Bros. film Street of Women, a Pre-Code fallen-women film for which she was loaned by Universal. Stuart's second film, again playing an ingénue, was in the football-hero film, The All-American.
In early December 1932, the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers announced that Gloria Stuart was one of fifteen new movie actresses "Most Likely to Succeed"—she was a WAMPAS Baby Star. Ginger Rogers, Mary Carlisle, Eleanor Holm were among the others. Stuart's career advanced when English director James Whale chose her for his film The Old Dark House, playing the glamour role of a sentimental wife who winds up stranded among strangers at a spooky mansion, among the ensemble cast. The film was critically praised, and The New York Times called Stuart's performance "clever and charming," with the movie later becoming a cult classic. Stuart's experience filming The Old Dark House also became integral to the formation of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933:
File:Gloria Stuart and Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House.jpg|thumb|right|Stuart and Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House
After filming completed, Stuart began canvassing for supporters; she became one of the union's first founding members. In June 1936, she helped Paul Muni, Franchot Tone, Ernst Lubitsch, and Oscar Hammerstein II form the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. That same year she and writer Dorothy Parker helped create the League to Support the Spanish Civil War Orphans.
Stuart was given her first co-starring role by director John Ford in her next film, Air Mail, playing opposite Pat O'Brien and Ralph Bellamy. Of her performance in the movie, The New York Times Mordaunt Hall wrote: "Gloria Stuart, who does so well in The Old Dark House, a picture now at the Rialto, makes the most of the part of the girl..." That two Gloria Stuart movies were in theaters simultaneously became the rule rather than the exception in her early career. In 1932, her first year, Stuart had four films released, then nine in 1933, six in 1934. In 1935, Stuart was having a baby, so only four movies were released. Six movies followed in 1936. After Air Mail, Mordaunt Hall's notices for Gloria Stuart came down to a few words. Laughter in Hell: "Gloria Stuart appears as Lorraine..."; Sweepings: "... played by the comely Gloria Stuart..."; Private Jones: "Gloria Stuart is charming..."
James Whale called Stuart back for just one scene in The Kiss Before the Mirror, but the critic Hall wrote, "There are those who may think that it is too bad to introduce as one of the players the dainty Gloria Stuart and have her killed off in the first episode of the narrative. Perhaps it is, but a pretty girl was needed for the part and Mr. Whale obviously did not wish to weaken his production by casting an incompetent actress or an unattractive one for this minor role."
After good notices in The Girl in 419,, and Secret of the Blue Room, James Whale cast Stuart opposite Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. Rains was a celebrated import from the London stage, and this was his first Hollywood film. After having appeared in several of Whale's films, Stuart became friends with him and his partner, David Lewis.
Stuart's husband, Gordon Newell, was unhappy with Hollywood life. He and Stuart separated amicably and divorced. In 1933, Stuart met Arthur Sheekman, one of the movie's writers. They were "instantly attracted to each other". Stuart and Sheekman married in August 1934.
In 1934, Universal loaned-out Stuart to Warner Brothers for Here Comes the Navy. Stuart co-starred with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, the first of nine films featuring this male team. Frank S. Nugent wrote in The New York Times, "Supporting Mr. Cagney--and doing very creditable jobs, too--are Pat O'Brien, Gloria Stuart..."