30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Carole Lombard was born Jane Alice Peters in October 1908, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the youngest of three children.
She moved with her mother to Los Angeles following her parents' divorce. She was spotted by director Allan Dwan playing in the street and he cast her at age twelve in her debut movie, 'A Perfect Crime' in 1921. This whetted her appetite for acting and she joined a theater troupe. She was eventually signed by the Fox film Corporation and firstly under the name Jane Peters, then Carole Lombard, she appeared as a beautiful blonde in several silent films such as Hearts and Spurs' in 1925. But in 1926 her face was left scarred after a car accident, and Fox canceled her contract. She found a new studio in Pathe, and when the talkies arrived she became a top Hollywood star, starting with 'High Voltage' in 1929.
Unaffected, clear-voiced, and reed-slender, Lombard was good in 'No Man of Her Own' in 1932, a rough romance with Clark Gable, but her real gift was for screwball comedy. She battles with John Barrymore in 'Twentieth Century' in 1934 and she cemented her comedic reputation in 'Hands Across the Table' the following year and again battles well with William Powell in 'My Man Godfrey' in 1936, for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress.
Offscreen, her similarly uncompromising approach, love of parties, and inelegant language earned her the nickname 'The Profane Angel'. she married the urbane William Powell, 16 years her senior, in 1931 and, although they divorced only 2 years later, they remained good friends for the rest of her life. She and Clarke Gable became involved in 1936 when Gable, the number one actor in Hollywood, attended a party thrown by Lombard. They married in 1939 during a break in production of 'Gone with the Wind'.
Lombard turned to straighter, nearly tearjerking romance with James Stewart in 'Made for Each Other' in 1939, and tried heavy melodrama in 'They Knew What They Wanted' in 1940. But her final roles found her happily back in marital comedy, as the suddenly unmarried wife in Hitchcock's 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' in 1941.
She died prematurely in a plane crash returning from a war-bond rally. All nineteen people on board, including her mother, were killed. Carole was 33 years old. She was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Roosevelt.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Lombard 23rd on its list of the 50 greatest American female screen legends.
