Exclusive! Titanic’s Gloria Stuart: Her Life in Pictures

A whole new generation got to experience the top-grossing movie of all time when it was re-released in theaters in April of 2012. Now Titanic is being released on Blu-ray DVD on September 10, 2012, and to celebrate, Snakkle wanted to once again acknowledge the incredible life of "Old Rose" played by the multi-talented Gloria Stuart. So keep clicking to see rare and exclusive photos provided by her grandson Benjamin Stuart Thompson, with captions written by her great granddaughter Deborah B. Thompson. Check out Deborah's book about her life as her grandmother's apprentice, Butterfly Summers: A Memoir of Gloria Stuart's Apprentice.

“This photo was taken in April of 1927, when my great grandmother Gloria was the lead in the senior class play at Santa Monica High. In this picture, you can see a kind of innocent calm that is not easily detected in all the other pictures of my great grandmother taken in the years to follow. In this picture, my great grandmother was about the same age as I when I began working as her artistic apprentice. My experience of learning printing, painting, and poetry from Great Gloria (as I called her) was so special that I was moved to write an ebook about it, called Butterfly Summers: A Memoir of Gloria Stuart's Apprentice.

“My great grandmother's father died when she was nine. She grew up with a stepfather who had a cruel sense of humor, so when she had the chance to leave home, she took it by enrolling in the only public university in California at the time, UC Berkeley. Here, she appears in a rollicking play set in a dance hall. My great grandmother had a very ribald sense of humor and several members of the Titanic cast and crew have mentioned to us that she kept everyone laughing their heads off whenever she was on the set. You can see that she and this actor are sharing a joke while the picture is being taken.”

“In this picture, my great grandmother would have been only a few months older than I am now. I can imagine how she felt swept up in the world of the movies. She felt that she was stepping down from the stage to become an actress for the studios. But she had been living as a starving artist in Carmel for about two years and the offer of $125 per week in 1932 was just a huge amount of money. You can see a bit of girlish glee in this picture, don't you think?” Check out our Where Are They Now: The cast of Titanic photo gallery here!

“In this photograph of my great grandmother, taken after more than a year of hard work as a contract studio player, there is a self-assurance and a joy that became her trademark. You can see the amusement behind her expression. When I started as her apprentice, I was very serious and a little timid. We worked together on her artist books over the course of five summers together. During that time, I absorbed much of this courage, self-assurance and, I would say, poise. Once, she saw that I had my violin with me after coming from a lesson and she asked me to play for her. I was embarrassed. She told me to play for myself and for the joy of it and not to allow the judgment of others to get in the way.”

“My great grandmother wearing a flower on her shoulder as she appeared in the 1933 film Sweepings with Drew Barrymore's great uncle, Lionel Barrymore. At that time, my great grandmother thought of herself as a stage actress, first and foremost. She was thrilled to be in a production with the legendary Barrymore.”

“In this staged candid, you can see some of the style that my great grandmother developed over the years. She loved flowing garments with bold colorful patterns. She loved her garden. She would garden in Santa Monica with her mother, and late in life she learned the art of miniature Japanese bonsai. She also loved animals. The Humphrey Bogarts were friends of my great grandmother and their dogs were boxers. So when my grandmother had a dog, it was a boxer, and when my father had dogs – they were boxers, and my favorite dog when I grew up was a boxer. Later, my great grandmother had a few special cats. She loved calico cats.”

In 1997, Stuart played a modern version of Kate Winslet’s lovelorn Rose DeWitt Bukater. Stuart was nominated for a Golden Globe, an Academy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and remains the oldest person to ever have been nominated for an Academy Award. Check out our Where Are They Now: The cast of Titanic photo gallery here!

“My great grandmother's printing press–Great Gloria taught me how to set movable lead type and print it by hand. This picture was taken during my first printing lesson in the studio. Visible on the shelf above Great Gloria's head is the black and white diagonal stripes of a sound clapboard from the set of Titanic.”

“This is one of my favorite pictures of a page from the Butterfly Book that we worked on together for over five years. My great grandmother's 100-year-old hand is on the page. We cut out all those tiny yellow and blue flowers from origami paper. I painted the star burst on the bottom curve of the page and cut out the cat with the bouquet swiping at a bird from black and silver paper. A calligrapher wrote the text.”

“This is the cover of my eBook, Butterfly Summers: A Memoir of Gloria Stuart's Apprentice. To buy a copy and see more pictures of my great grandmother's butterfly book, visit http://www.butterflysummersmemoir.com/. The eBook is widely available, including for iPad and on Amazon for Kindle.”