The Smackdown of '97 is in just 5 days. Here's how to vote.
We first see Gloria Stuart 11 minutes into Titanic (1997). Rose (age 100) is the first and only one of the film's main characters we meet in Titanic's twenty-one minute prologue which takes place in 1996. The television is on in the other room when we first see her in long shot. A news report about a discovery involving the RMS Titanic is playing, piquing her interest...
Turn that up dear.
She joins her grandmother by the TV and she can scarcely believe what she sees there. A nude drawing of herself as a young woman.
Well, I'll be goddamned.
Gloria Stuart was not yet 2 years old when the actual RMS Titanic sunk in 1912 and was 87 at the time of the blockbuster film's release.
The excitement around her Oscar nomination for the phenomenally successful film at the time was, in part, due to Stuart's "comeback". She had been a (minor) star in Hollywood's Golden Age. She had burst onto the scene in 1932 with five films in release and was named one of 15 "most likely to succeed actresses" in a promotional campaign for the movie industry. Like so many careers in Hollywood, then and now, her success was shortlived. By the mid 40s her acting career was over (though she would resurface in the 1980s as a senior actress for intermittent film work beginning with the Peter O' Toole picture My Favourite Year).
Gloria Stuart with Boris Karloff in "The Old Dark House"
Because she had so many films released in 1932 it's impossible to know which felt the most like an introduction to audiences of the time. She cites the Kay Francis romantic drama Street of Women (1932) as her first film but it seems more likely that it was an Irene Dunne picture Back Street, since it's her only "uncredited" role that year. Her first movie to actually hit theaters was The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood, an inside showbiz comedy in which she played... herself? Later in the year she was in the sports drama The All-American. Her most enduring 1932 film, though, is easier to ascertain. That's inarguably the James Whale's horror picture The Old Dark House. She played Margaret Waverton one of five strangers who all seek shelter in a spooky house during a storm. It's fun and just 72 minutes long. Have you ever seen it?
The Supporting Actress Smackdown of '97 hits Monday night so watch and vote before then.