Gloria Stewart is an American actress who has starred in more than 70 motion pictures, theatrical productions and TV series. Her most famous film roles are in the science fiction of the 1940s "The Invisible Man" and the famous melodrama "Titanic", where she embodied the image of the aged Rose Calvert.
Gloria Stewart is one of the 10 most beautiful actresses in classic Hollywood. She co-founded the Screen Actors Guild of America and helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.
Childhood and adolescence of the actress
Born Gloria Frances Stewart was born in Santa Monica on July 4, 1910, two years before the real Titanic sank.
The actress had two brothers, one of whom died in infancy, and the other became a sports columnist for The Los Angeles Times.
The actress shortened the English spelling of her surname “Stewart” to “Stuart”, explaining: “Because I thought, and now I think, the six letters of my surname harmoniously look with the six letters of my name on the playbill.”
Gloria Stewart entered the University of California at Berkeley, where she met her future husband, sculptor Gordon Newill.
After moving to Carmel, a small town in California, in 1930, Gloria and Newill joined the bohemian society, including the famous photographer Edward Weston and journalist Lincoln Staffens.
Career and work of the actress
Gloria began acting at The Golden Bough and writing for the daily newspaper.
In 1932, the actress's husband's best friend, Ward Ritchie, took her to Pasadena, where Gloria was offered a role in the city's prestigious theater: "The morning after the premiere of Chekhov's The Seagull, I signed a seven-year contract with Universal."
Soon Gloria Stewart appeared in her first film "Girl in 419", where the aspiring actress played a mysterious woman who witnessed a crime.
Among the early films of Gloria Stewart - the classic horror film "The Scary Old House" with Boris Karloff, as well as the fantastic horror film "The Invisible Man", where Gloria received the female lead.
Gloria Stewart played the girlfriend of the main character in the comedy "The Navy Comes Into Business", the faithful wife of Warner Baxter in the biographical drama "Prisoner of Shark Island", the cousin of the main character in the comedy "Rebecca from Sunnybrook Farm", a capricious rich girl who fell in love with a penniless guy in the comedy "The Gold Miners of 1935".
In the mid-1940s, Gloria Stewart left the film industry due to the annoying, constant stereotypical roles of "girl reporter", "girl reporter", "girl on the front page", "girl overboard."
Gloria Stewart recalled: “Once I burned everything: my scripts, my photographs, everything. It all burned with a wonderful and liberating fire. The actress changed her creative field from playing to drawing pictures. In 1961, she exhibited her work for the first time at an art gallery in New York.
In 1966, after 20 years after a long hiatus, Gloria Stewart returned to filming and working in television films and series. The last motion picture with the participation of the actress was the war drama "Land of Plenty", where Gloria got a very small role.
In 1983, Ward Ritchie, an American designer, taught Gloria the basics of her craft and she became a book and brochure designer.
Gloria Stewart in Titanic
The American actress has never been a Hollywood legend. That is why the director of the famous cult film "Titanic" James Cameron drew attention to Stewart. He was looking for an elderly, not the most famous actress for the role of the aged Rose Calvert, "who is still viable, in her mind, without alcohol addiction and without attacks of rheumatism."
Gloria Stewart turned out to be so "alive" that it took 1.5 hours every day to throw the actress another ten years and make up an 86-year-old woman like the 101-year-old aged protagonist Rose.
For her superbly performed supporting role, Gloria Stewart was nominated for an Oscar, becoming the oldest actress ever to be nominated for a prestigious award in the history of cinema. But then the Oscar went to actress Kim Basinger.
Personal life of the actress
Gloria Stewart has been married twice.
In 1930, the actress married Gordon Newell, whom she met during her student days. The marriage lasted four years and ended in divorce.
In the same year, Gloria Stewart married Arthur Shikman, a motion picture screenwriter.
A decade later, after the departure of Gloria Stewart from the cinema, the Shikman family went on a round-the-world trip, the last point of which was New York. The couple had their only daughter, Sylvia (she will become the author of cookery books). Later, the couple moved to Italy, where Gloria took up painting. The actress's artwork was successfully sold in New York, Los Angeles and other cities. In the 1940s, the couple acquired their own furniture store, where the couple sold lamps and tables, many of which were bought by famous stars, for example, Judy Garland. In 1978, the actress's husband died.
In her youth, Gloria Stewart met her first husband's best friend, Ward Ritchie. In the 1980s, he taught her the basics of book design. The longtime acquaintance turned into a romantic relationship that lasted until Richie's death in 1996 at the age of 91.
Gloria Stewart has lived a long life. The actress died at the age of honor on September 26, 2010 from respiratory failure, having reached her 100th birthday.
Stewart has 4 grandchildren (the oldest was born in 1957) and 12 great-grandchildren.
