Titanic told a fictional story by using a real-life tragedy as the basis, and while its main characters aren’t based on real people, many other minor characters were, but their stories were cut and left as deleted scenes. James Cameron has explored a variety of genres in his career as a filmmaker, starting with horror with Piranha II: The Spawning and going through sci-fi with The Terminator and even action-comedy with True Lies. Cameron’s name is now linked to big-budget movies thanks to Avatar, but in 1997, he shared his biggest project to date and which continues to be one of his most important achievements: Titanic.
Titanic is an epic romance and disaster film based on the accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. It tells the story of Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), two passengers from different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage. Over the course of just four days, Rose and Jack met and fell in love, and they also met different characters from different social classes, of which many were based on real-life people. However, as the focus of Titanic was the romance between Rose and Jack, the stories of most of those characters based on real passengers of the ship were cut from the movie, and so the final cut couldn’t honor the best true stories that came from that tragedy.
These stories are a combination of notable passengers of the ship, unbelievable survival stories, and passengers accepting their fate as their chances to survive became smaller and smaller. Here are the Titanic deleted scenes that honor the best true stories of characters based on real-life people.
The Chinese Man
One of Titanic’s deleted scenes shows Fifth Officer Harold Lowe (Ioan Gruffud) looking for survivors in the water. Before he got to Rose, he found a Chinese man floating on a door on all-fours. His name was Fang Lang, and he was one of the six Chinese survivors of the Titanic, but his problems didn’t stop once he was rescued from the freezing waters of the ocean. According to the BBC, once Fang Lang and the rest of the Chinese survivors arrived at the immigrant inspection station in Ellis Island in New York, they were expelled from the US due to the controversial Chinese Exclusion Act. They were sent to Cuba and later made their way to the UK, where they found jobs as sailors as there was a shortage of these as many British sailors enlisted in the army during World War I. Sadly, Fang Lang and the rest were vilified by the media following the sinking of the Titanic, and were called “creatures” and accused of hiding beneath the seats of the lifeboats and even dressing as women to get priority to board the lifeboats, but historians say there’s no proof of all these, and Fang Lang even helped row on the lifeboat that rescued him and ferry everyone on board to safety.
Charles Joughin aka The Drunk Baker
Perhaps one of the most fascinating and unbelievable survival stories from the Titanic is that of the drunk baker Jack and Rose saw on the bow as the ship was sinking, who in a deleted scene is shown throwing chairs off the ship and drinking (a lot). This man was Charles Joughin, an English-American chef and chief baker who was actually off-duty and in his bunk when the Titanic hit the iceberg. When he heard that officers were getting the lifeboats ready for launching, he sent his men to the boat deck with provisions for those in the lifeboats, and he later joined Chief Officer Henry Wilde by Lifeboat 10 to help women and children get to the lifeboats – and there was a point where he reportedly began throwing them into the lifeboats. He was later assigned as captain of that boat but chose not to board, so he went to his quarters to “have a drop of liqueur” which ended up being a tumbler half-full.
As seen in Titanic, Joughin ran toward the poop deck, climbed to the starboard side, and got hold of the safety rail as the ship went down, where he “rode it down as if it were an elevator”, making sure his head wouldn’t get under the water. Once in the water, he clutched to debris and paddled and trod water for about two hours, and he was later found by Collapsible B, led by Second Officer Charles Lightoller, but there was no room for him in the boat – however, cook Isaac Maynard was on board and held his hand as Joughin held onto the side of the boat, with his legs and feet still in the water. Joughin was finally rescued when another lifeboat appeared and later boarded the Carpathia with other survivors.
