The Probert Encyclopaedia of Actors

CLARK GABLE

Clark Gable was an American actor. He was born in 1901 at Cadiz, Ohio and died in 1960. The son of an oil field worker. Gable left school at 14 and held a number of jobs, including tyre factory worker and lumberjack, but his first love was acting. Friend Lionel Barrymore arranged a screen test for Clark Gable at MGM, which he failed. However, after Clark Gable made an impressive film debut in The Painted Desert, the studio changed its mind and signed him to a contract. A series of successful films followed; in fact, he made eight movies in 1931 alone, but it was in 1934, when on loan to Columbia, that he scored a great triumph in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, for which he received the Oscar as best actor.

Clark Gable separated from his second wife, socialite Rhea Langham, in 1935 and married actress Carole Lombard in 1939, while he was in the midst of playing Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. In 1942, Carole Lombard was killed in a plane crash, and shortly thereafter Clark Gable joined the US Army Air Force and flew several bombing missions over Germany during the Second World War. After the war, Clark Gable returned to Hollywood and made more films. Finally, in the 1950s, age caught up with Clark Gable and his popularity began to wane.
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