It wasn’t Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack who came through for Kate Winslet’s Rose when she demanded, “I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.”
Like clockwork, a recurring viral rumor has resurfaced as the 25th anniversary of “Titanic” looms: The sketch featured in one of the most iconic — and quoted — scenes from James Cameron’s classic doomed love story was actually done by the director.
“No, Jim Cameron actually drew that,” Winslet revealed in a 2017 interview with Stephen Colbert during the film’s 20th anniversary. “Maybe no one even knows that until this moment right now. Jim Cameron drew that — and he did actually sketch me.”
As the soundbite goes viral for the umpteenth time, Winslet also revealed that she was not naked during the scene, but rather wearing a bathing suit.
The “Mare of Easttown” Emmy winner, 47, said the sketch has haunted her since the film came out, since fans often ask her to autograph replicas of the nude artwork.
“I don’t sign that one,” said Winslet in a 2014 interview with Yahoo! Movies UK. “It feels very uncomfortable. Why would you do that? … They were asking me to sign it. People ask me to sign that one a lot, and actually there’s a photo of it as well that someone’s lifted from a still of the film.”
“That photo gets passed around. It’s like, ‘No, I didn’t mean for it to be a photograph that I would end up seeing 16, 17 years later,’ ” said the actress, bursting into laughter. “It’s quite funny, really.”
In 2021, Cameron, 68, released “Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron” that included the sketch alongside several designs from the first “Avatar” movie and from the “Terminator” series.
With the film’s 25th anniversary approaching, Cameron said he would be re-releasing the romance film in theaters, marking the fourth time the film would appear on the silver screen since it sailed into theaters in 1997.
Cameron also launched an investigation into whether or not the door — which has been the subject of several debates — would have supported both Winslet’s and DiCaprio’s characters.
“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived,” concluded Cameron to the Toronto Sun.
According to Cameron, Jack could have survived, but there were too many variables to consider. Cameron also firmly believed that Jack “needed to die.”
“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” he explained. “It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice.”
The Ship of Dreams is scheduled to make port into theaters Feb. 10 for a limited screening.
