Dorothy Gibson - Titanic Disaster and Subsequent Film Career

Titanic Disaster and Subsequent Film Career

One of Gibson's most famous screen roles was that of herself in Saved From the Titanic (1912), based on her experiences in the legendary disaster. Saved From the Titanic, released a month after the sinking, was the first of many films about the event.

The Titanic is the best known aspect of Gibson's life. After a six-week vacation in Italy with her mother, she was returning aboard Titanic to make a new series of pictures for Eclair at Fort Lee. The women had been playing bridge with friends in the lounge on the night of the ship's fatal collision with the iceberg. With two of their game partners they escaped in Lifeboat #7, the first lifeboat launched. After arriving in New York on the rescue ship Carpathia, Gibson was persuaded by her manager to appear in a film based on the sinking. She not only starred in the one-reel drama but also wrote the scenario. She even appeared in the very same clothing she had worn aboard the Titanic that night—a white silk evening dress topped with a cardigan and polo coat.

Although Saved From the Titanic was a tremendous success in America, Britain, and France the only known prints were destroyed in a 1914 fire at the Éclair Studios. The loss of the motion picture is considered by film historians to be one of the greatest of the silent era. Gibson's other accomplishments in early cinema included starring in one of the first feature films made in the United States (Hands Across the Sea, 1911), co-starring in the first American-produced serial or chapter play (The Revenge of the Silk Masks, 1912), and making one of the first-ever public appearances by a movie personality (January 1912).

With contemporary Mary Pickford, Gibson was the highest paid movie actress in the world at the time of her premature retirement in May 1912. In a brief but eventful cinematic career, Gibson appeared in an estimated sixteen Eclair films and in an unspecified number while at Lubin and IMP studios. Gibson left movies to pursue a choral career, her most notable appearance in that venue being at the Metropolitan Opera House in Madame Sans-Gene (1915).