Waves of memory surged forward as Gloria Stuart drank tea and ate a scone in her suite at a Manhattan hotel. Flowers kept arriving while she talked.
Recalling how she was cast in the new film "Titanic" as the spirited 101-year-old survivor of the disaster, she said the director, James Cameron, had been searching for an actress of the 1930s who was - she laughed - "still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down." Stuart was determined to get the part, she said, and when the casting director asked if she would read for Cameron without make-up, she was tempted to reply, "I'll read for him without clothes!"The role she won was that of Rose Calvert, the lively, independent centenarian whose memories frame the $200 million film. In preparing for the role, Stuart arranged to meet Kate Winslet, who plays Rose's younger self, in order to study her gestures and body language; the two watched each other's screen tests and split a bottle of champagne.
"I was always aware that I was playing this beautiful, frustrated, feisty, angry young girl," Stuart said. She had found the filming a perpetual pleasure: "Every single day was a new adventure." She even enjoyed being made up, though it took an hour and a half to acquire the wrinkles and another hour to remove them.
Stuard, 87, is a third-generation Californian who majored in philosophy at Berkeley and acted there. After stints in small California theaters, she played the depressive Masha in Chekhov's "Seagull" at the Pasadena Playhouse; the ebullient 22-year-old loved saying, "I am in mourning for my life."
Talent scouts from Paramount and Universal saw the production, competed to sign her up, and soon she was contracted to Universal. "I never struggled, never begged," she said. "I didn't have to sleep with anybody."
Among her 46 movies, a particular favorite is James Whale's "Old Dark House," a stygian comedy of 1932. Stuart plays a briskly rational sophisticate trapped in a household of lunatics during a torrential storm.
She explained that the movie satirized some of Whale's other films, like "Frankenstein."
When he directed her in "The Invisible Man" and "The Kiss Before the Mirror," he was deeply serious, she said, but during "The Old Dark House," he was savoring the creation of a deadpan parody of the gothic style.
In 1934 Stuart married Arthur Sheekman, who wrote comedies and collaborated on the scripts of "Monkey Business," "Horse Feathers" and "Duck Soup" for the Marx Brothers. Groucho Marx called him "the fastest wit in the West." Today she remarks that "Groucho taught me irreverence," though it seems unlikely that she needed instruction.
Stuart was a founder of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933 and served on its board; she helped to organize the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and to form a committee to aid orphans of the Spanish Civil War. When Vittorio Mussolini, the dictator's son, visited Hollywood as the guest of the producer Hal Roach, Stuart and her friends ran ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, telling him that he was unwelcome in their town.
In the late 1940s Stuart received a letter asking her to appear before the California Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. She tore up the missive - "I thought it was silly" - dropped it in a wastebasket and heard no more.
In 1983 she learned printing from Ward Ritchie, a master printer and book designer she had met at Berkeley in 1930. Both were widowed. Soon she was creating artists' books in limited editions.
Stuart greatly enjoyed dancing with Peter O'Toole in a cameo role in "My Favorite Year" and working with Angela Lansbury in an episode of "Murder She Wrote," but she said she felt that "Titanic" gave her the finest role of her career. She was also delighted by the authenticity of the sets and costumes - and was fascinated by the technology, especially the submersibles that sent cameras inside the real Titanic under two and a half miles of water.
Recently she has been nominated for a Golden Globe award for best supporting actress, one of eight nominations for "Titanic." She is to receive the Screen Actors Guild's annual award in Hollywood in March. And in a town of steaming jealousies and foul feuds, she hears applause.