A Night to Remember
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40 free A Night to Remember trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
When Walter Lord published A Night to Remember in 1955, the Titanic had been half forgotten for a generation. His short, fast-moving account of the ship's last hours put the story back in front of the public, and it has never been out of print since. Three years later a British crew turned it into a film that many historians still rate as the most faithful telling of the disaster on screen. This quiz covers all of it: the author and how the book came to be written, the American television play that followed, and the 1958 film, from its cast and its production to the liberties it took with the facts. Along the way you will meet the officers, passengers and rescuers whose choices that night the book made famous. It is pitched for Titanic buffs, classic film fans and book groups reading Lord for the first time. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind each fact as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A Night to Remember reused shots from a 1943 Titanic film made as propaganda in which country?
Germany
Germany made its wartime Titanic to pin the disaster on British plutocrats. Four of its clips, showing the ship at sea and a flooding engine-room walkway, were reused in the 1958 film.
Q 02A Night to Remember (1958) opens with which launch ceremony that the real Titanic never received?
A christening
A christening was never White Star Line practice, so the real ship slid into the water without one. Popular lore later blamed the missing ritual for the Titanic's bad luck.
Q 03Which lucky toy did Edith Russell carry off the Titanic, a story retold in A Night to Remember?
A musical pig
A musical pig, a papier-mâché music box that played a dance tune when its tail was twisted, went into Lifeboat 11 with her. Russell wound it up to calm the frightened children around her.
Q 04Charles Lightoller, hero of A Night to Remember, later took his yacht to which wartime evacuation?
Dunkirk
Dunkirk drew the retired Lightoller across the Channel in his motor yacht Sundowner. In a boat licensed to carry 21 passengers, he and his crew brought home about 130 servicemen.
Q 05Four actors with small parts in A Night to Remember each later played which James Bond character?
Q
Q was played in 17 Bond films by Desmond Llewelyn, seen here as a steward holding a gate shut against steerage passengers. Peter Burton, Geoffrey Bayldon and Alec McCowen also took the role.
Q 06How does A Night to Remember (1958) show the Titanic going down, as most experts then believed?
Sinking in one piece
Sinking in one piece was the accepted version for decades, although some of those rescued swore the hull had split. Only the discovery of the wreck on the seabed settled the argument in their favour.
Q 07Which British star plays Second Officer Lightoller, the central figure of A Night to Remember?
Kenneth More
Kenneth More had recently played fighter ace Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky. When extras balked at jumping into icy water on a November night shoot, he leapt in first and instantly regretted it.
Q 08Isidor Straus, who stays aboard with wife Ida in A Night to Remember, co-owned which famous store?
Macy's
Macy's has a memorial plaque to the couple at its Manhattan flagship store. Ida refused to get into a lifeboat without Isidor, and neither of them left the ship.
Q 09Which director hired Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, to advise on a 1997 blockbuster?
James Cameron
James Cameron leaned on the historian while filming Titanic, four decades after the book came out. Lord had by then updated the story himself in a 1986 sequel, written after the wreck was found.
Q 10Which Titanic crewman in A Night to Remember (1958) turns to the bottle, yet survives the icy sea?
The chief baker
The chief baker, Charles Joughin, told the inquiry he trod water for about two hours after downing half a tumbler of liqueur. He had already given up his own lifeboat place.
Q 11Walter Lord, author of A Night to Remember, sailed as a boy on which sister ship of the Titanic?
Olympic
Olympic carried the young Lord across the Atlantic from New York in the 1920s. He recalled decks that seemed to go on for miles, and hours spent with crayons trying to match the pinkish buff of her funnels.
Q 12What was Walter Lord's day job when he wrote A Night to Remember in his spare time?
Advertising copywriter
Advertising copywriter was his trade at a big New York agency, although he held a law degree. The book sold so well that he was able to quit and write history full time.
Q 13Walter Lord followed A Night to Remember with Day of Infamy, a 1957 account of which attack?
Pearl Harbor
Q 21Which future director of The Sting staged A Night to Remember as a live television play in 1956?
George Roy Hill
George Roy Hill also co-wrote the script, and the two jobs brought him Emmy nominations for writing and directing. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was still thirteen years away.
Q 22Which future Avengers star played Thomas Andrews in the 1956 television play of A Night to Remember?
Patrick Macnee
Patrick Macnee took the part five years before he first appeared as the secret agent John Steed. In the British film of 1958 the shipbuilder was played by Michael Goodliffe.
Q 23Which British director made A Night to Remember (1958) and later turned to Hammer horror films?
Roy Ward Baker
Pearl Harbor had changed Lord's own life: he broke off his law studies to join the Army after the attack. He spent the war as a code clerk in London with the Office of Strategic Services.
Q 14Whose 1985 discovery of the Titanic wreck led Walter Lord to write a second book on the disaster?
Robert Ballard
Robert Ballard's find set off a new wave of public interest in the lost liner. Lord's answer, three decades after his first Titanic book, was a volume of second thoughts and fresh theories.
Q 15Which evidence, gathered four decades on, did Walter Lord chiefly use to write A Night to Remember?
Survivor interviews
Survivor interviews with 63 people who had been aboard gave the book its minute-by-minute detail. Lord also mined the memoirs and articles that those people had written.
Q 16The book A Night to Remember follows survivor Harold Bride in naming which tune as the band's last?
Autumn
Autumn is the tune the wireless operator said he heard at the end. The 1958 film set the book aside on this point and used the hymn of popular legend instead.
Q 17Which future Goldfinger star plays first-class wife Liz Lucas in A Night to Remember (1958)?
Honor Blackman
Honor Blackman's character is a composite of several real wives who were parted from their husbands at the boats. Six years later she was cast as Pussy Galore.
Q 18Which future Man from U.N.C.L.E. star plays wireless operator Harold Bride in A Night to Remember?
David McCallum
David McCallum was 24 when the film was shot. Fame came in the 1960s as the Russian agent Illya Kuryakin, and four decades later as the medical examiner Ducky in NCIS.
Q 19Which American network staged A Night to Remember as a live play in 1956, two years before the film?
NBC
NBC showed it as part of Kraft Television Theatre to an audience of 28 million. With 31 sets and 107 actors, it was called the most complex live television show attempted up to then.
Q 20Which Casablanca actor narrated the live 1956 television version of A Night to Remember?
Claude Rains
Claude Rains tied the play's many short scenes together with narration, a device borrowed from radio drama. He had first found film fame without showing his face, as The Invisible Man.
Roy Ward Baker found the book in his favourite bookshop and set out to secure the film rights. He had earlier spent three years in Hollywood, where he directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock.
Q 24Which spy novelist, author of The Mask of Dimitrios, scripted the film A Night to Remember?
Eric Ambler
Eric Ambler already had an Oscar nomination for scripting another story of the sea, The Cruel Sea. The director himself recommended him for the Titanic job.
Q 25A Night to Remember producer William MacQuitty saw the Titanic launched, aged six, in which city?
Belfast
Belfast was his birthplace, and he remembered the scene at the Harland and Wolff yard vividly for the rest of his life. He decided to film the story after his wife gave him the book.
Q 26At which British studio was A Night to Remember filmed, on sets built from the Titanic's own plans?
Pinewood
Pinewood housed thirty sets copied from the shipbuilders' original drawings. When the tilting sets creaked, the director kept the noise in because it made the final scenes more realistic.
Q 27What record did A Night to Remember set among British films when it was shot in 1957 and 1958?
Highest budget
Highest budget in British film history to that point, at up to £600,000, did not buy a hit. Takings were modest, partly because the film underperformed in American cinemas.
Q 28Which American awards honoured A Night to Remember in 1959 as best English-language foreign film?
Golden Globes
Golden Globes voters gave it the Samuel Goldwyn International Award. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic praised the film, even though its box office disappointed.
Q 29Tucker McGuire plays which Denver socialite, one of the few Americans in A Night to Remember?
Molly Brown
Molly Brown survived a script that dropped most of the American passengers or turned them British. The director's defence was that it was a British film made by British artists for a British audience.
Q 30In A Night to Remember, which ship's captain sleeps while the Titanic fires rockets ten miles away?
Californian
Californian had stopped for the night at the edge of the ice, with her wireless operator off duty. Her captain objected to being shown in pyjamas in his cabin: he had been dozing in uniform in the chart room.