Millvina Dean, who has died aged 97, was the last survivor from the sinking of the Titanic on 14 April 1912. After decades of obscurity and shunning the increasing worldwide interest in the disaster that claimed more than 1,500 lives, she changed her mind in her mid-70s and, with a wry bemusement, largely enjoyed the sometimes near-hysterical attention she attracted. As one of a small and steadily shrinking number of survivors, she was, throughout the last 30 years, a regular attender at conventions and exhibitions across the world and was much sought-after by the media. Her freely given autograph was prized and increasingly valuable. "I've lost count of the number of things I have put my name to," she said in 1998.

Dean often had to remind the world that the White Star liner's collision with an iceberg in the north Atlantic was first and foremost a human tragedy. Her father was among the dead. She never watched Titanic, James Cameron's £125m blockbuster movie of 1997, saying that it was too upsetting to think about whether her father had leapt into the sea from the stern of the ship or had been one of the hundreds who died when the boat finally sank.

Exploiters of the Titanic legend or salvagers from the wreck could expect short shrift from Dean. She was particularly unhappy when a US toy manufacturer made a novelty inflatable slide based on the Titanic, with a bouncy iceberg as an optional extra.

She was born Elizabeth Gladys Dean in London, where her parents, Bertram and Georgette (Ettie), ran a pub. At just nine weeks old Millvina, as her family called her, was the youngest passenger on the Titanic when her family set sail as third-class passengers from Southampton bound for New York. They were heading for Wichita, Kansas, where Bertram planned to open a tobacconist's shop. He had originally booked on another White Star liner, but was transferred because of a coal strike.

When the 46,328-ton ship, on its maiden transatlantic voyage, struck the iceberg, Bertram, unlike many who believed that it was unsinkable, immediately realised the seriousness of the situation and got his family quickly on to deck. Millvina, wrapped in a sack, her 23-month-old brother, also called Bertram, and 32-year-old Ettie all got into lifeboats and were picked up by the rescue ship RMS Carpathia. They never saw her father again.

In a mirror image of her fame in later life, Dean was briefly a media celebrity. While on board the SS Adriatic, the boat that brought them back to England from New York, the Daily Mirror on 12 May 1912 reported: "So keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second-class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than 10 minutes."

She returned with her mother and brother to the family farm at Bartley on the edge of the New Forest and the tragedy was rarely mentioned. She was eight years old before her mother even told her that she had been on the Titanic and what had happened to her father.

She attended local schools, but, after finding out about her past, felt that she was viewed by many as some kind of oddity or freak. She never married and worked as a secretary in Southampton before retiring from an engineering firm in 1972 and returning to live on the edge of the New Forest. Bert enjoyed media attention until his death, in 1992, aged 82. But in 1987 Dean was persuaded to attend a memorial service in St Michael's church in Southampton to mark the 75th anniversary of the sinking and discovered a fascination with the ship that never left her.

It opened up new experiences. She met thousands of people and visited countries she had never seen before. In 1997, she completed the journey that the disaster had interrupted, by crossing the Atlantic on the QE2 and visiting the house in Kansas that the family had intended to live in. But she declined an invitation to take a submarine trip to see the wreckage as well as a cruise to the spot where the Titanic had sunk.

However, a local street was named in her honour and a memorial unveiled at Southampton docks. She gave numerous talks to schools. In 1997 she said: "People look at me as a sort of celebrity. I certainly don't think of myself as one. But I really do enjoy it. I've always liked meeting people."

Recently, after she had had to sell family possessions in order to pay her nursing home fees, a group of friends set up the Millvina fund to assist her. Contributors included Cameron and the stars of his 1997 movie, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

• Millvina (Elizabeth Gladys) Dean, Titanic survivor, born 2 February 1912; died 31 May 2009

• This article was amended on 1 June 2009. The original gave Millvina Dean's birthplace as Hampshire, and named the initial rescue ship as the SS Adriatic. This has been corrected.

• This is an updated version of the obituary that first appeared on theguardian.com on Sunday 31 May. This final version was published in the Guardian on Thursday 4 June.