Meet The Titanic’s Youngest Survivor Who Lived To 97 Who Refused To See Legendary ‘Titanic’ Movie

Since Titanic’s release in 1997, the youngest real-life survivor Millvina Dean refused to see it until she died at 97 in 2009. She never publicly spoke about the tragic incident which happened in 1912, until 1985 when the ill-fated ship’s wreckage was found. Dean was only nine weeks old when she got on the ship with her parents and older brother.

Although Dean and her family were not supposed to board the Titanic. However, they set sail from Southampton, England after a coal strike canceled their original trip. According to the Los Angeles Times obituary of Dean, they meant to cross the Atlantic on the White Star Line ship, which offered them third-class tickets on the Titanic instead.

The Titanic’s youngest survivor

After Dean’s father, Frank sold their family-owned pub in England, he decided to co-run a store with his cousin in Kansas City, Missouri, alongside his wife and two children. Sadly, their ship hit an iceberg and sank, leading Frank to his death as with many other third-class men who were refused lifeboats.

RELATED: Before James Cameron, First ‘Titanic’ Movie Was In 1912 Starring Real Survivor

Dean, her mother, and her two-year-old brother were rescued, and she credits this to Frank, who felt the collision. “I think it was my father who saved us. So many other people thought the Titanic would never sink, and they didn’t bother. My father didn’t take a chance,” Dean recalled in 2002.

Like Dean, her mother never spoke about the unfortunate incident for years, but she finally opened up when Dean was 8. “My mother would never speak of it, because it was her husband and they were only married four years. He was strikingly handsome. I didn’t know anything about it until I was 8 years old. And then my mother got married again,” the late Dean told the Belfast Telegraph in 2009. “That’s when I first heard about the Titanic and about my father going down, everything like that.”

Dean, who recieved an education thanks to the Titanic Relief Fund, also revealed it was likely that the White Star Lines employees stopped third-class passengers from going above deck and escaping. “It couldn’t happen nowadays, and it’s so wrong, so unjust,” she bitterly recounted. Three weeks after losing her dad, Dean returned to England with her mother and brother alongside other survivors via the RMS Adriatic. “Passengers who knew what the family had been through lined up to hold baby Millvina, the youngest survivor of the Titanic,” The Los Angeles Times’ Mary Rourke stated in Dean’s obituary.