Titanic's Most Heartbreaking Deleted Death Scene Was Much Worse Than Jack Drowning
Titanic did not become one of the most popular movies ever for no reason.
Cameron's disaster epic is packed with awesome and dramatic scenes. But still more scenes which could have been gems in most other movies were left on the cutting floor, perhaps because the movie already was long and they could have destroyed the pacing.
Yet there is at least one scene which might have been left out of the final version due to being too heartbreaking.
Titanic 's story is centered about a romance between Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet ) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio ), two passengers from different social classes, set against the background of the famous sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912. But the movie also features a good number of compelling and memorable side characters.
One of those characters is eight-year-old Cora Cartmell (Alexandrea Owens-Sarno). You might remember her as the girl who dances with Jack before Rose at the Irish party held in the third class (she is also briefly seen in her father's arms at the beginning, when the passengers are boarding the doomed ship).
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But after the party she is never seen again, until the very end of the movie. That's because she is supposed to die in the early stages of the ship's sinking.
Cora and her father perished before they could even reach the main deck – the stairs got closed, trapping many of the third-class passengers. As lower-deck spaces of Titanic quickly filled with water, Cora and her father drowned.
The scene, however, never made it into the theatrical cut, like a number of scenes, which expanded and/or concluded stories of various minor characters. Some of those also were death scenes, as various characters were caught by the unfolding disaster one after another, but Cora's scene was probably the most tragic of them all.
The movie still indicated the fate of Cora and her father to the audience, but only subtly. As mentioned above, Cora and her father appear at the very end of the movie, when Rose reunites with Jack at the Grand Staircase, and all the passengers who died on the ship give them applause – including Cora.