Gloria Stuart

Gloria Stuart was born on a dining room table on 4th Street in Santa Monica, California, on July 4, 1910. As a young girl, she performed in plays produced in her home. She starred in her senior class play at Santa Monica High School in 1927. While attending the University of California, Berkeley, she continued to perform on stage. Stuart married and moved to Carmel, where she appeared in a production of *The Seagull*, which later transferred to the Pasadena Playhouse in 1932. It was there that talent scouts from Paramount and Universal saw her. In a well-known dispute, the heads of the two studios flipped a coin, and Universal won. She played lead roles for director James Whale, including *The Old Dark House* (1932), *The Invisible Man* (1933), and *The Kiss Before the Mirror* (1933). The demanding work at the studio caused a rift with her first husband (Stuart helped create the Screen Actors Guild). She played the leading lady in *Roman Scandals* (1933), on the set of which she met her second husband, Arthur Sheekman. Dissatisfied with the roles offered at Universal, she took roles in films for other studios. A few years after giving birth to her daughter Sylvia (named after the role she was playing when she met Sheekman), she left the cinema and sought stage roles in New York. In the 1940s, she opened an art furniture shop where she created decoupage lamps, tables, and trays, many of which were sold to stars like Judy Garland. Later, Stuart took up oil painting and became very prolific, showing and selling her work in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Her landscapes of The Watts Towers are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum. She also took up and mastered the art of bonsai, and some of her trees are in the permanent collection at the Huntington Library Japanese Garden. When her husband fell ill in the 1970s (he died in 1978), she returned to acting, appearing in a range of television series. In 1982, she returned to the screen in a brief dance scene with Peter O'Toole in *My Favorite Year* (1982). Around this time, a friend she had known half a century earlier in Carmel, who was a master printer, re-entered her life, and from him, Stuart learned the craft of fine printing. She established a printing press in her home studio called *Imprenta Glorias*, where she created a body of fine artist's books. Her most significant work, *Flight of Butterfly Kites*, is in the permanent collection at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Gloria Stuart won a Screen Actors Guild Award and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as the Old Rose in *Titanic* (1997). In July 2010, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Gloria Stuart with a Centennial Celebration; she was the first honoree to be alive for a centennial. At 100 years of age, she completed her greatest artist's book with her great-granddaughter working as her apprentice and also made her final film appearance in her grandson's documentary about her, *Secret Life of Old Rose: The Art of Gloria Stuart* (2012). She died at home at the age of 100 on September 26, 2010.