Gloria Stuart^†

At 86, she came back from fifty years of retirement to play the only version of Old Rose that James Cameron could actually cast: someone who had lived through most of the century being depicted. Her 1930s work at Universal, including The Invisible Man (1933) with James Whale, had been forgotten long before Titanic was greenlit. At 87, the Academy nominated her for Best Supporting Actress, making her the oldest nominee for that award in the ceremony's history. She'd spent the gap years as a painter, fine printer, and furniture store owner.

A founding member of the Screen Actors Guild who spent roughly fifty years outside the industry she helped build. Titanic changed the math: the SAG ensemble nomination in 1998 came decades after she'd helped organize the union. In June 2010, SAG gave her its Ralph Morgan Award. Two months later, the Academy filled the Samuel Goldwyn Theater with 1,000 people for a career tribute. She died that September, having made her name twice, once at the dawn of talkies and once in the era of CGI spectacle.

Born on the Fourth of July, which is either fitting for someone who made it to 100 or a complete coincidence. After leaving acting in the 1940s, she spent decades as a fine printer and painter, with solo shows in New York, Austria, and Italy. She published a memoir in 1999 called I Just Kept Hoping, which is about as perfect a title as you get. She'd beaten breast cancer before Titanic was even in production. The comeback wasn't a fluke or a nostalgia cast. It was a second life.

Stuart died from respiratory failure at her home in Los Angeles at age 100 on September 26, 2010, having survived a lung cancer diagnosis for five years. Two months before her death, the Academy honored her with a career retrospective at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, drawing 1,000 attendees. SAG had presented her with its Ralph Morgan Award that June. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter ran obituaries noting she was the oldest nominee for Best Supporting Actress in Academy Awards history.