The incredible life of Titanic's youngest survivor, who lived to 97 and refused to see James Cameron's movie

The youngest passenger aboard the Titanic, she boarded the ship with her mother, Georgette, her father, Bertram Frank, and her brother, Bertram Vere, on April 10, 1912, before the ship set sail from Southampton, England.

The family was supposed to cross the Atlantic on a different White Star Line ship, according to the Los Angeles Times' obituary of Dean. However, a coal strike led to the cancellation of their original voyage. The White Star Line offered them third-class tickets on the Titanic instead.

The Deans were going to Missouri to be with her father's cousin, who owned a store in Kansas City, according to Millvina Dean's obituary in The New York Times. Her father was going to co-own the store after the Deans sold the pub they owned in England.

Dean said her father felt the ship collide with the iceberg, which might have saved his family's lives.

"I think it was my father who saved us," Dean told the Los Angeles Times. "So many other people thought the Titanic would never sink, and they didn't bother. My father didn't take a chance."

Dean, her mother, and brother were put on lifeboat 13, as reported by BBC News.

The survivors on lifeboats were later picked up by the RMS Carpathia and taken to New York City. But Dean's father was among the more than 1,500 people who died in the tragedy. 

Dean said she believed it was true that White Star Lines employees had prevented third-class passengers from going above deck and potentially escaping the sinking ship, The New York Times reported.

"It couldn't happen nowadays, and it's so wrong, so unjust. What do they say? 'Judy O'Grady and the colonel's lady are sisters under the skin.' That's the way it should have been that night, but it wasn't," she said.

Three weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, the RMS Adriatic took some survivors back to England. Dean, her mother, and brother were on board.

"Passengers who knew what the family had been through lined up to hold baby Millvina, the youngest survivor of the Titanic. To keep the line moving, a ship's officer ordered that no one could hold the baby for more than 10 minutes," wrote Mary Rourke of the Los Angeles Times in Dean's obituary.

"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. That's when I first heard about the Titanic, and about my father going down, everything like that," she told the Belfast Telegraph in 2009.

In another interview with the Irish Times, the Los Angeles Times reported, Dean said that her mother suffered severe headaches every day after the sinking.

The White Star Line rather infamously didn't accept any liability for the Titanic's sinking for years, even though the tragedy left almost all of its passengers with no money, no possessions, and in many cases, no breadwinner — many families lost their husbands and fathers since they couldn't get on lifeboats.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2003 that four years after the crash, the White Star Line agreed to pay the US $665,000, or roughly $430 per passenger.

In 2025, that'd be around $12,972 each.

According to the Los Angeles Times, after the war, she worked as a secretary in an engineering office for 20 years.

"Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either," she said, according to The New York Times. "But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me."

For decades after, Millvina Dean attended many Titanic exhibitions, conventions, and events. She also traveled to different schools to tell her life's story.

Even though Dean had said she didn't feel a huge connection to her father since she never really knew him, she couldn't watch any movies or documentaries about the Titanic.

"Because that's the ship on which my father went down. Although I didn't remember him, nothing about him, I would still be emotional. I would think: 'How did he go down? Did he go down with the ship or did he jump overboard?'" she told the Belfast Telegraph in May 2009, weeks before her death.

Her mother lived to be 96, dying in 1975, according to The New York Times.

Eighty-five years after the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, Dean finally completed the journey from Southampton to New York City, reported the Deseret News.

According to United Press International, after she arrived in NYC in August, she then journeyed to Kansas City to visit the neighborhood that would've been hers, if everything had gone to plan.

After breaking her hip in 2006, Dean began living in a nursing home. To help with expenses, she auctioned off some items that had been with her family on the Titanic, including a suitcase that sold for $18,650. In total, she raised $53,906, according to NBC News.

Reuters reported that the trio behind "Titanic" donated $30,000 to Dean after her longtime friend Don Mullan challenged them to.

"I laid down the challenge to the 'Titanic' actors and directors to support the Millvina Fund and I was delighted with the generosity they have shown in meeting that challenge," Mullan told the Irish Examiner in 2009.

Millvina Dean's ashes were scattered by her partner, Bruno Nordmanis, at the Southampton Docks, where the Titanic left for its first and only voyage, NBC News reported.