Gloria Stuart was born in Santa Monica, California, did some acting while in college at the University of California at Berkeley and later worked on stage in little theater productions. Universal enticed the glamourous blond actress with the assurance of "big plans", but outside of her films for director James Whale (The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and The Kiss Before the Mirror), that promise went unkept as the studio stuck her in a long series of unmemorable program pictures. After a stint at 20th Century-Fox turned out the same way, Stuart went back to the stage and then (in the mid-'40s) retired from acting. Since then, she has taken up painting and has had one-woman shows in New York, Austria and Italy. In the 1970s, she returned to acting. Widowed since 1978 (her husband was screenwriter Arthur Sheekman ), she was Oscar-nominated for her performance as the 100-year-old survivor of the sinking of the Titanic.



Titanic (1997): $10,000/week
Street of Women (1932): $125/week

Oldest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, 2/10/98. Founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. Titanic (1997) was her second film that featured a doomed ship. One of her early film, Here Comes the Navy (1934), was filmed aboard the USS Arizona. Shortened her last name from "Stewart" to "Stuart" because she thought its six letters balanced perfectly on a theater's marquee with the six letters in "Gloria". Following her husband's death she engaged in a decade-long relationship with printer Ward Ritchie, born in 1904. They first met 1930 when he was a best friend of first husband, sculptor Blair Gordon Newell. The two reacquainted in March 1983 and lived together until his death in 1996. Second wife of screenwriter Arthur Sheekman. She has four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. She graduated from Santa Monica High School in 1927 and attended the University of California-Berkeley but dropped out. Her brother, Frank Finch, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, was born in 1911. Twelve great-grandchildren are Sarah-Leah Thompson; Jacob Thompson; Samuel Thompson; Deborah Thompson; Tzipporah Thompson; Maggie Thompson; Dylan, Weston, Stuart, Jasen, Frannie, and Katie. In Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), Stuart played a young woman whose mother pushes her to marry an unlikable rich man, but the young woman falls in love with a poor man. In Titanic (1997), Stuart's character did all that, 84 years earlier. Lives directly opposite the house in Brentwood, CA where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered by O.J. Simpson.