Oddly, one person that stood out in the movie, for me, was Molly Brown, who tried her best to have the lifeboat she was in go back and save more people. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find out more about her but I came up dry.

She's quite a legend: http://www.mollybrown.com/intro.html

The person that played her in Titanic actually looks quite a bit like her too.