The Fablieaux

“Titanic” stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and the film’s director James Cameron have responded to a challenge and donated $30,000 to support the last survivor of the Titanic in her last years, a representative for DiCaprio said Monday.

“We’re extremely thankful that there is only one survivor left.” DiCaprio’s spokesperson Diane Truseau commented, “Could you imagine how little each person would get f we had to split it between 2,200?”.

The survivor, 97-year-old Millvina Dean, has reportedly resorted to selling her autograph to pay her nursing home bills in Southampton, the English city from which “Titanic” began its fateful maiden voyage in 1912.

Dean was only 9 weeks old when her family traveled on Titanic in hopes of beginning a new life in the United States. Her father was one of the 1,517 casualties after the supposedly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg in the Atlantic.

DiCaprio, Winslet and Cameron made their combined $30,000 donation after Irish author and photographer Don Mullan publicly challenged them to match his donation, said Ken Sunshine, a spokesman for DiCaprio. Mullan, who photographed Dean for an exhibition, made his appeal last month in the Irish Independent newspaper.

The 1997 drama “Titanic” made more than $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office, making it the highest-grossing film of all time in figures not adjusted for inflation. It went on to win 11 Oscars, including best picture.

Truseau summed it up best, saying “Lucky for us, that $30,000 was only 0.0016% of our take. Dean’s needs aside, it is very expensive to be a rich person, and celebrities can’t afford to be giving their money away. We were lucky this time that there was only one survivor left. We may not be so lucky next time.”