Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/16674
continued, “so the actors that I worked with, they all came from the New York theatre. Tat’s how the union started. Tey had gone through the [1929] Equity strike [in Hollywood], which was murderous for actors. So, the working conditions for us were really terrible, especially for women. I got up at 5 in the morning. In makeup at 6. Hair at 7. Wardrobe at 8. On the set at 9. Sometimes, I didn’t get home until 12 or 1 the next day. Ten I was back at 5 or 6 in the morning....Te big stars, the great stars of Metro and Paramount certainly had their way as to when they would work and how long they would work. But the lesser players did not. We did what the first assistant told us to do. He told us what the production office told him to do.” Stuart was recruited to Guild membership while working on I Like It Tat Way at Universal with Guild founders and board members Lucile Gleason and Noel Madison. “When the Guild members talked to me, I was ready to go!” she recalled in an April interview at her home. On November 2, 1933, Stuart was accepted as a Guild member along with major stars like Carole Lombard, Victor McLaglan, Will Rogers, Richard Dix, Claudette Colbert and Bebe Daniels, and the screen’s first “movie star,” Florence Lawrence. Stuart recounted her efforts during those years to recruit others to Guild membership: “I worked very hard telephoning people. All the people I came into contact with, all the actors, I was talking union.” By 1937, her hard work on behalf of the Guild — which had swelled to 5,500 members — and with organizations like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League brought her to the attention of the Guild’s nominating committee, and she was elected to the board, attending her first meeting as a new board member on June 7, 1937, just three weeks aſter the Guild signed its first studio contract. Stuart appeared in more than 40 motion pictures by 1946 — a dozen of them during her years of board service. She then took a break to travel the world and “foreswore ever doing a film again.” She would go on to have a successful second career as an artist, selling out her 1961 debut at the Hammer Galleries in New York. While she continued to paint through the early ’80s, she reactivated her acting career as a senior performer in 1975, which culminated in her performance in the second-highest grossing film of all time, Titanic. “I remember great premieres...like Garbo or Dietrich or Gone with the Wind. I remember those but I never had a premiere. Te first one was Titanic. It was everything I had seen in the movies,” Stuart told Cameron, her voice wavering with emotion. “It’s something I always wanted and I finally got it.” Te National Board of Directors of Screen Actors Guild passed a resolution on April 21 to recognize Stuart’s accomplishments and deliver a special giſt to her. Te giſt: a green malachite “biseki” (meaning “beautiful stone”) from Zaire, with a diaza base. And on July 22, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saluted Stuart with a Centennial Celebration, ABOVE: “Kites,” painted by Gloria Stuart. RIGHT: malachite “biseki” presented to her by the National Board in 2010. marking the first time one of its members was honored and still living at 100 years of age. At the June 19 presentation of the Ralph Morgan Award ceremony (see also page 26), Stuart waved down a standing ovation and tremendous applause. She addressed the gathered membership for a minute and a half, choosing her words carefully in a voice that these days is just above a whisper: “It seems to be half of my life that I’ve been here with you, hoping, praying and being very, very grateful to have been born and raised in a ‘family’ of actors. I think that we have the most talent, the most insight, the most ability to understand, sympathize, and go from there up, than any other group of people in the world. I think we have a burden, and opportunity, and a wonderful life of giving and sharing and enjoying, more than any other people. So enjoy!” From left: Stuart at Nov. 30, 1937, board meeting with Paul Harvey, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone and Humphrey Bogart; Universal Studios publicity stunt for her film Airmail (1932); at home in 1937 with dog Lucrezia; on a 1938 magazine cover; heading the chorus in I Like It That Way (1933), the film she was working on when she joined the Guild. SAG.org Summer 2010 - SCREEN ACTOR 21