What happened to Cora, Jack's 'best girl' from Titanic?

Eight-year-old Cora Cartmell was the youngster from third class on the doomed Titanic, who Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack deemed his ‘best girl’.

Cora was played all that time ago – 20 years this year, in fact – by Alexandrea Owens-Sarno, who is now an actual grown-up person, oddly enough.

She has a degree in writing from California State University and, it seems, is more than happy to chat about her experiences on the movie with Leo and Kate Winslet.

“My mom has an amazing picture of me, Leo, Kate, and my little sister Rachel hanging out when they were resetting for the dancing scene. It’s one of my favorites and is a reminder of just how lucky I am to have worked with two of the best actors out there,” She told Buzzfeed in a recent interview.

“Leonardo DiCaprio was an absolute doll. He was so fun and charming. He loved to put a smile on everyone’s face. [I’d often] be on his lap with a PB&J in between takes.”

And weirdly, despite the passage of 20 years, she still gets recognised.

“I’ve had a couple people recognize me in the past few years. I went to a bar with some friends, recently, for example; our server came by, took our drink orders, and when she came back with them, she said, ‘I have a really weird question for you’,” she went on.

“Yes, she asked me if I was in Titanic, and she full-on said to me, ‘I was going to walk up to you and just say, ‘You’re still my best girl, Cora’, but I didn’t want to be wrong and then feel like an idiot’. But I really wish she had, because that would have made my entire life.”

She also recalls sitting drawing pictures with DiCaprio during takes. “If I remember correctly, we were drawing the world, and we were drawing the rain, which was God crying. I have this really weird memory of that,” she adds.

Her character featured most notably in the raucous scene where Kate Winslet’s Rose heads off to slum it in third class, where there’s all manner of drinking and dancing going on.

As Rose cuts in on the eight-year-old (not cool, by the way) so she can dance with Jack, he delivers the heart-melting line.

These days Alexandra is using her skills for ‘writing sketch comedy that I’ll start producing very soon, and I’m also in the process of writing a novel’.

She still does a bit of acting too, appearing in the movies ‘The Sluagh’ and ‘A Closer Walk With Thee’, intriguingly described as ‘a homoerotic evangelical exorcism film’, both out last year.

Read more
The best movie posters of 2017 so far
Has Walt Disney Animation Studios overtaken Pixar?
Matrix cast reunited at John Wick 2 premiere