Comprehensive information and links about Clark Gable

Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960) was an American film actor, and the biggest box-office star of the early sound film era. He was born in Cadiz, Ohio to William H. Gable and Adeline Hershelman. Gable had German ancestry from both sides of his family tree; his maternal grandfather, John Hershelman, was German, as were Gable's paternal great-great-grandparents, Johan Frankenfield and Catharine Haupt. When he was six months old, his sickly Catholic mother had him baptized Roman Catholic. She died when he was ten months old, probably as the result of a brain tumour.

His father married again and the new family settled in the neighboring Ohio town of Hopedale where Clark went to school. In his late teens, they moved to Ravenna, just outside of Akron, but Clark had trouble settling down and soon left school to work in Akron's tire factories. After seeing a play which impressed him, he formed an ambition to be an actor but was not able to make a real start until he turned twenty-one and could inherit money that had been left to him. He started to tour with several second-class theater companies and worked his way across the midwest to Portland, Oregon, where he found work as a tie salesman in a department store. While there he met the grandson of the well-known actress Laura Hope Crews who encouraged him back onto the stage and into another theater company. His acting coach was Josephine Dillon, who had his teeth fixed and eventually thought him ready to attempt a film career.

In 1924, with Josephine's financial aid, they went to Hollywood where she became his manager and his first wife. Although he found work as an extra and bit player in such silent films as starring Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major roles and so returned to the stage. It was only after his impressive appearance in the lead of that he was offered a contract with MGM in 1930. Gable's first role in a sound picture, the villain in a low-budget William Boyd western called (1931), drew a shocking amount of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and appearance, which forced the studio to take notice. He worked mainly as a supporting actor for several films until (1931), in which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer, then he never played another supporting role as long as he lived. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM frequently paired him in vehicles with well-established female stars such as Shearer, Joan Crawford (with whom he made eight movies), and Greta Garbo. In the following years he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures which levitated him to megastar status, earning the undisputed title of "King of Hollywood". Throughout most of the 1930s and '40s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.

When MGM head Louis B. Mayer decided that Gable was getting difficult and ungrateful, he got a brilliant idea: loan Gable out to the lower-rank Columbia studio; that would teach him a lesson. The result: Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in the film . He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.

Gable is, however, best-known for his performance as Rhett Butler in the 1939 classic , which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. A few years before, he had also earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Fletcher Christian in 1935's . In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Decades later, Gable would say that whenever his career would start to fade, a re-release of would instantly revive everything, and he continued as a top leading man for the rest of his life.

Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife, actress Carole Lombard, was reportedly the happiest period of his personal life, but it ended with her death in a plane crash in 1942. He was devastated and joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. During his service, Gable, among other tasks, flew several raids over Nazi Germany, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts. He left the Army Air Forces with the rank of Major. His first movie after returning from service in WWII was the 1945 production of (a remake of a movie he had made two decades earlier), Gable became increasingly unhappy with the mediocre roles offered him by MGM as a mature actor. He refused to renew his contract with them in 1953 and proceeded to work independently.

His second wife had been Texas socialite Rhea Langham Davis, and his fourth was English actress Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée who also was the widow of Douglas Fairbanks. His fifth wife, married after an on-again, off-again affair spanning 13 years, was Kathleen Williams Capps de Alzaga Spreckels, a thrice-married former fashion model and stock actress from the town of North East, Pennsylvania. She was the mother of Gable's posthumous son, John Clark Gable, born on March 20, 1961, four months after his father's death; she also had two children from her third marriage, Joan and Adolph Spreckels III (nicknamed "Bunker").

Gable also had a daughter, Judy Lewis, born in 1935, the result of an affair with actress Loretta Young, begun on the set of . In an elaborate scheme, Young took an extended vacation and went to Europe to give birth. On her return, she claimed to have adopted Judy (a gambit that got stranger when the child grew to look eerily like her mother, only with ears sticking out like Gable's). According to Lewis, Gable visited her home once, but didn't tell her that he was her father. While neither Gable nor Young would ever publicly acknowledge their daughter's real parentage, this fact was so widely known that in Lewis's autobiography , she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from other children at school.

Gable's last film was , which co-starred Marilyn Monroe, in her last completed screen performance, and Montgomery Clift. Written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, many critics regard Gable's performance in his final film to be his finest. Gable died Los Angeles, California in November, 1960, the result of a heart attack. He was 59. There was much speculation about Gable's physically demanding role having contributed to his sudden death soon afterward, yanking on and being dragged by horses. In a widely reported quote, Kay Gable blamed it on stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)"; others have blamed Gable's crash diet before filming began; for years, Gable's head would sometimes shake from the diet pills he would take to strip off pounds before making a film, a practice which may have contributed to his early death.

He was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, beside his beloved Carole Lombard.

The Candid Camera Story (Very Candid) of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures 1937 Convention (1937) (short subject)

Trivia

The 6'1" Gable had dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He had a muscular build, and weighed about 190 pounds at the time of . He wore a 44-long suit. Later in life, his hair grayed, his face weathered, and he put on considerable weight (in his late 50s, he weighed 230 pounds). He chain-smoked and liked whiskey. To get in shape for , he went on a severe diet and dropped to 195 lbs.

Gable had a reputation as an outdoorsman. At first, it was an image conceived by the MGM publicity department, but Gable found that he liked the life