Gloria Stuart spent the 1930s being calm in the middle of other people's pictures and was asked to do little else. Sixty years later, as Old Rose in Titanic, that same restraint turned out to be exactly what a very loud film needed.
Fi1m perspective
An old woman sits at a table on a salvage ship, surrounded by men who want to know where a diamond is, and tells them about a boy instead. That is Gloria Stuart in Titanic (1997), at 87, and it is the performance most people know her for. She does not raise her voice and she does not weep on cue. James Cameron's film is built for large feelings and James Horner's score keeps pushing towards them; Stuart is the one element that holds back, and the film is better for having somewhere quiet to return to. We were moved more than we expected to be, and it was because she declined to do the crying the men across the table were plainly waiting for.
She had been a lead sixty years earlier. Universal signed her in 1932 and put her in pre-Code pictures, three of them for James Whale, and the two worth finding are The Old Dark House (1932), in which she is the poised guest among Boris Karloff and the storm, and The Invisible Man (1933), opposite Claude Rains. She worked twice for John Ford. Warner Bros borrowed her for Here Comes the Navy (1934), where Orry-Kelly dresses her against a wall of white uniforms so that she reads as the one person on screen not in the navy. She is warm in it and she does what she can, but Dorothy Martin is a prize, not a person: a brother to placate, a man to wait for, and nothing else.
That was the pattern, and it did not change when she moved to Fox. The studios looked at her and saw an elegant blonde who could stand still at the centre of an ensemble and make everyone around her look more frantic, which is a real skill and a limited one, and they wrote for the limit. Critics then and since have said much the same: early promise, then routine pictures that used the face and not the actor. By 1946 she had largely stopped, dissatisfied with what she was being offered, and there were only sporadic returns from the late 1970s before Cameron came calling.
Old Rose asks for the thing the thirties never wanted. Give Stuart something to withhold and she is good at it. Give her a man to wait for and she waits gracefully, which is all that can be said. After Titanic she worked occasionally, in film and on television, until Land of Plenty (2004). Her own account of the audition is the best note on her. After the first reading she wrote to Cameron, "I've re-read the script and I should've given it a feistier reading." She got the part anyway. The stillness was what he wanted, and it had been sitting unused since 1934.
Biography
Gloria Stuart was an American actress. She appeared in numerous films during the 1930s, including The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933).
Stuart returned to prominent screen roles late in her career as Old Rose in Titanic (1997). Her performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She also appeared in later television series such as Murder, She Wrote (1984) and Touched by an Angel (1994). Stuart died in 2010.
