Much of her story (told in the stage musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown [1960; film 1964]) was a mixture of fact and fiction that she had promoted with high spirit.

Daughter of a ditchdigger, Molly Tobin received little formal education and went to work in her early teens. About 1884 she followed her brother to the mining town of Leadville, Colo., met a silver-mine manager, James J. Brown (1849?-1922), and married him in 1886. (A popular story that their first fortune was accidentally burned in a stove was a later exaggeration of an event in which a mere $75 in coin was scorched.) In 1894 he struck it moderately rich in a gold find, and the two moved to Denver, where she sought rather garishly and unsuccessfully to enter Denver society. After her husband left her (while continuing to support her), she began visiting New York and Newport, R.I., and then Europe and succeeded in becoming a raconteur and life of the party among the rich and famous, including the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys.

During the sinking of the Titanic she helped command a lifeboat, oaring and directing the oars, and afterward on the rescue ship Carpathia nursed ill survivors through long hours. The American press celebrated her as the Unsinkable Mrs. Brown.

After her husband's death her finances slowly diminished in the 1920s, and she died in genteel poverty at New York's Barbizon-Club Hotel.