Post by topbilled on Nov 5, 2024 16:45:06 GMT
Gloria Stuart had a long and successful career as a screen actress. She was discovered in a play at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1932. Both Paramount and Universal offered her contracts, and ultimately a flip of the coin decided which studio she signed with! It’s a good thing she wound up at Universal, since that is where she’d meet director James Whale who cast her in several of his famous horror films. Gloria quickly proved her versatility. In addition to parts in horror dramas, she appeared in romance dramas, comedies and musicals. She was often requested by other studios, and had notable loan outs to Columbia, RKO and Warner Brothers. By the mid-to-late 1930s she had moved over to 20th Century Fox, where she was used in ‘A’ films with Shirley Temple; and in ‘B’ films— usually mysteries— with Michael Whalen. Gloria’s career continued well into the mid-1940s, at which point she took a long break to focus on married life and a second career as a painter. She would return to the screen in the mid-1970s, but her greatest success would not come until she was cast as a centenarian in the 1997 blockbuster TITANIC. Appropriately, Gloria herself would live to reach 100.
Check out:
THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)
THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR (1933)