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William Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 –
November 16, 1960) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor and
the biggest box office star of the early sound film era.
In 1999, the American Film Institute named
Gable among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 7.
****
Birth name William Clark Gable
Born February 1, 1901
Cadiz, Ohio, USA
Died November 16, 1960
Los Angeles, California, USA
Academy Awards
Best Actor
1934 It Happened One Night
****
Early life
Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on
February 1, 1901 to William H. Gable, an oil-well driller and Adeline
Hershelman, a prospector. 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. Contrary to popular belief, Gable never had a
middle name but was registered simply as Clark Gable. He temporarily
adopted his father's name as a teenager only to drop it again a few
years later.[1]
When he was six months old, his sickly
mother had him baptized Roman Catholic. She died when he was ten months
old, probably as the result of an aggressive brain tumor. Following her
death, Gable's father's family refused to countenance any notion of
raising the child a Catholic, provoking an enmity with his late mother's
side of the family. The dispute was resolved when the Protestant side
agreed to allow young William Clark Gable to spend more time with his
mother's Catholic relatives.
In April 1903, Gable's father, Will Gable,
married Jennie Dunlap, whose family came from the small neighboring Ohio
town of Hopedale. Will purchased land there and built a house and the
new Gable family settled in. By 1917, Clark was in high school when his
father's business had financial difficulties. Will decided to try his
hand at farming and the family moved to Ravenna, just outside of Akron,
but Clark had trouble settling down and soon left school to work in
Akron's tire factories.
Gable was inspired to be an actor after
seeing a life-impressing play, but he was not able to make a real start
until he turned 21 and could inherit money that had been left to him. By
then, Jennie had died. Deciding not to follow his father, Clark found
work 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 the Meier & Frank department store. While there he met the
grandson of 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 after some rigorous
training eventually considered him ready to attempt a film career.
Hollywood
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 The Plastic Age starring Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major
roles and so returned to the stage. It was only after his impressive
appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the
play The Last Mile that he was offered a contract with MGM in 1930.
Gable's first role in a sound picture was as the villain in a low-budget
William Boyd western called The Painted Desert (1931). He received a
great amount of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and
appearance, which forced the studio to take notice.
He worked mainly in supporting roles, often
as the "heavy", building his fame and public visibility during 1931 in
such important movies as A Free Soul, in which he played a gangster who
slapped Norma Shearer (Gable never played a supporting role again as
long as he lived after that slap), Susan Lennox: Her Rise and Fall with
Greta Garbo, and Possessed, in which he and Joan Crawford steamed up the
screen with some of the passion they shared for decades in real life. To
bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM was now frequently pairing him
with well-established female stars, such as Jean Harlow. An enormously
popular combination, Gable and Harlow were paired together in six films,
the most notable being Red Dust and Saratoga, during production of which
Harlow would die of kidney failure. In the following years, he acted in
a succession of enormously popular pictures which levitated him to
megastar status, earning him the undisputed title of "King of
Hollywood." Throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s, he was arguably the
world's biggest movie star.
When MGM head Louis B. Mayer decided that
Gable was getting difficult and ungrateful, he loaned 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 It Happened One Night. He returned to MGM a bigger star than
ever.
In 1930, Clark and Josephine Dillon were
granted a divorce. A few days later, he married Texas socialite Ria
Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they had to
be married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal
requirements.
Most Famous Roles
Despite his reluctance at the time to
appear in the role, Gable is best known for his performance as Rhett
Butler in the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, which earned him an
Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. At the time, Gable was wary of
potentially disappointing a public who had decided no one else could
play the part.
A few years before, Gable had also earned
an Academy Award nomination for his role as Fletcher Christian in 1935's
Mutiny on the Bounty. 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 Gone With the Wind would instantly revive
everything, and he continued as a top leading man for the rest of his
life.
Marriage to Carole Lombard and World War
II
Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife,
successful actress Carole Lombard, was reportedly the happiest period of
his personal life. They purchased a ranch at Encino and once Clark had
become accustomed to her often blunt way of expressing herself, they
found they had much in common.
Then, on January 16, 1942, the idyll ended.
Lombard, who had just wrapped her 57th film, To Be Or Not To Be, was on
a tour to sell war bonds when the twin-engine DC-3 she was travelling in
crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Upon hearing the news, Gable
flew to the scene and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing the
snowcapped mountain himself in an effort to rescue her.[citation needed]
After Carole's body was recovered, he reportedly sobbed, "Oh, God! I
don't want to go back to an empty house..."[citation needed]
Lombard's death, declared the first
war-related female casualty the U.S. suffered during World War II, was
the worst loss her husband ever endured. Gable lived out his life at the
couple's Encino home, made 27 more movies and even remarried twice. "But
he was never the same," said Esther Williams. "His heart sank a
bit."[citation needed]
Devastated and inconsolable at the loss of
Lombard, Gable soon joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. As Captain Clark
Gable he trained with and accompanied the 351st Heavy Bomb Group as head
of a 6-man motion picture unit making a gunnery training film. While at
RAF Polebrook, England, Gable flew five combat missions, including one
to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May
4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished
Flying Cross for his efforts. He left the Army Air Forces with the rank
of Major.
After World War II
His first movie after returning from
service in WWII was the 1945 production of Adventure. It was a critical
and commercial failure and, despite some subsequent popular successes
such as Mogambo (a remake of Red Dust, which 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.
In 1949, Clark married Sylvia Ashley, a
British divorcée who also was the widow of Douglas Fairbanks.
Unfortunately, this relationship was profoundly unsuccessful and they
divorced in 1952.
His fifth wife, married after an on-again,
off-again affair spanning thirteen years, was Kay Spreckels (full name
Kathleen Williams Capps de Alzaga Spreckels), a thrice-married former
fashion model and stock actress. She was the mother of Gable's son, John
Clark Gable, born on March 20, 1961, four months after Clark'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 (b.
1935), the result of an affair with actress Loretta Young, begun on the
set of Call of the Wild. 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 he 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
Uncommon Knowledge, she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from
other children at school. Loretta Young would never officially
acknowledge the fact, which she said would be the same as admitting to a
"venial sin". However, she finally gave her biographer permission to
include it only on the condition the book not be published until after
Young's death.
Death
Gable's last film was The Misfits (written
by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston), which co-starred Marilyn
Monroe and Montgomery Clift. The Misfits would prove not only to be
Gable's swan song, but it would also mark the final completed
performance by Marilyn Monroe. Many critics regard Gable's performance
in his final film to be his finest. Gable died in Los Angeles,
California in November 1960, the result of a fourth heart attack.
There was much speculation about Gable's
physically demanding Misfits role (which required yanking on and being
dragged by horses) having contributed to his sudden death soon
afterward. In a widely reported quote, Kathleen Gable blamed it on
stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)". Monroe,
on the other hand, claimed that she and Kathleen had become close during
the filming and would refer to Clark as "Our Man". (Spicer, Clark Gable,
McFarland, pp. 300-301). Support for Monroe's claim may be found in that
Kathleen Gable specifically invited Marilyn to Gable's funeral and the
two of them sat together in the church during the service, as shown in
contemporary newsreels. 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. [citation
needed] It should be noted that Gable was in poor health when filming
began from years of heavy smoking and drinking, and in the previous
decade had suffered two seizures which may have been heart attacks.
[citation needed]
Clark Gable is interred in Forest Lawn
Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, beside his beloved
Carole Lombard.
Filmography
Feature films
White Man (1924)
Forbidden Paradise (1924)
Declassee (1925)
The Merry Widow (1925)
The Plastic Age (1925)
North Star (1925)
The Johnstown Flood (1926)
One Minute to Play (1926)
The Painted Desert (1931)
The Easiest Way (1931)
Dance, Fools, Dance (1931)
The Finger Points (1931)
The Secret Six (1931)
Laughing Sinners (1931)
A Free Soul (1931)
Night Nurse (1931)
Sporting Blood (1931)
Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931)
Possessed (1931)
Hell Divers (1931)
Polly of the Circus (1932)
Red Dust (1932)
No Man of Her Own (1932)
Strange Interlude (1932)
The White Sister (1933)
Hold Your Man (1933)
Night Flight (1933)
Dancing Lady (1933)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Men in White (1934)
Manhattan Melodrama (1934)
Chained (1934)
Forsaking All Others (1934)
After Office Hours (1935)
China Seas (1935)
The Call of the Wild (1935)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Wife vs. Secretary (1936)
San Francisco (1936)
Cain and Mabel (1936)
Love on the Run (1936)
Parnell (1937)
Saratoga (1937)
Test Pilot (1938)
Too Hot to Handle (1938)
Idiot's Delight (1939)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Strange Cargo (1940)
Boom Town (1940)
Comrade X (1940)
They Met in Bombay (1941)
Honky Tonk (1941)
Somewhere I'll Find You (1942)
Adventure (1945)
The Hucksters (1947)
Homecoming (1948)
Command Decision (1948)
Any Number Can Play (1949)
Key to the City (1950)
To Please a Lady (1950)
Across the Wide Missouri (1951)
Callaway Went Thataway (1951) (cameo)
Lone Star (1952)
Never Let Me Go (1953)
Mogambo (1953)
Betrayed (1954)
Soldier of Fortune (1955)
The Tall Men (1955)
The King and Four Queens (1956)
Band of Angels (1957)
Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)
Teacher's Pet (1958)
But Not for Me (1959)
It Started in Naples (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Documentaries and short subjects
The Pacemakers (1925) (short subject)
The Merry Kiddo (1925) (short subject)
What Price Gloria? (1925) (short subject)
The Christmas Party (1931) (short subject)
Jackie Cooper's Birthday Party (1931)
(short subject)
Screen Snapshots (1932) (short subject)
Hollywood on Parade No. 9 (1933) (short
subject)
Hollywood Hobbies (1935) (short subject)
Starlit Days at the Lido (1935) (short
subject)
Hollywood Party (1937) (short subject)
The Candid Camera Story (Very Candid) of
the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures 1937 Convention (1937) (short subject)
Hollywood Goes to Town (1938) (short
subject)
Screen Snapshots: Stars on Horseback (1939)
(short subject)
Hollywood Hobbies (1939) (short subject)
Northward, Ho! (1940) (short subject)
You Can't Fool a Camera (1941) (short
subject)
Combat America (1943) (documentary)
Show Business at War (1943) (short subject)
Wings Up (1943) (short subject)
Screen Snapshots: Hollywood in Uniform
(1943) (short subject)
Screen Actors (1950) (short subject)
Preceded by
Charles Laughton
for The Private Life of Henry VIII Academy
Award for Best Actor
1934
for It Happened One Night Succeeded by
Victor McLaglen
for The Informer
Trivia
In order to meet Wikipedia's quality
standards, this article's trivia section requires cleanup.
Content in the trivia section should be
integrated into other appropriate areas of the article.
The 6 feet 1 inch (185 cm) Gable had dark
brown hair and hazel eyes. He had a muscular build, and weighed about
190 pounds (86 kg) at the time of Gone With the Wind. 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 The Misfits, 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 lifestyle, and spent time in the outdoors
whenever he could.
During the filming of Gone With the Wind,
Vivian Leigh complained about Gable's bad breath, which was apparently
caused by his false teeth. They otherwise got along well.
The sixth track on the The Postal Service's
debut album, Give Up is entitled "Clark Gable." The song includes the
lyric "I kissed you in a style Clark Gable would have admired (I thought
it classic)," paying homage to Mr. Gable's film career.
His name was part of the inspiration for
the name of Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, the other half coming from
Kent Taylor.
Clark disliked Greta Garbo and the feeling
was mutual. She thought he was a wooden actor while he considered her to
be a snob.
During production of Saratoga, co-star Jean
Harlow died of kidney failure. Ninety percent completed, the remaining
scenes were filmed with long shots or doubles. Gable would say that
during the remaining ten percent, he felt as if he were "in the arms of
a ghost".[2]
In the British comedy Monty Python and the
Holy Grail, the knights of the round table mention that they enjoy
impersonating Clark Gable.
Adolf Hitler esteemed Gable above all other
actors, and during the Second World War offered a sizable reward to
anyone who could capture and return Gable unscathed to him.[3]
On his tombstone, it reads, "Back to
silence."
He is mentioned in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail in the knights of camalot song where they sing "And
impersonate Clark Gable"
References
1. Spicer, Chrystopher J. (2002). Clark
Gable: Biography, Filmography, Bibliography. McFarland & Company, 7, 30.
ISBN 0-7864-1124-4. But another biography says,
His original name was probably William
Clark Gable, but the usual authorities in such matters — including birth
registrations and school records — contradict one another. The first
name must have been in honor of his father, William Henry Gable. . .
"Clark" was the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. In childhood he
was almost always called "Clark," although some friends called him "Clarkie,"
"Billy," or "Gabe."
Harris, Warren G. (2002). Clark Gable: A
Biography. Harmony, 1. ISBN 0-609-60495-3.
2. Harris, p. 179.
3. Harris, p. 268.
****
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