30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
"His ears are too big and he looks like an ape." So said Warner Bros. executive Darryl F. Zanuck about Clark Gable after a screen test. Some ape. Clark Gable was to become an Academy Award-winning American film actor and one of the biggest Movie Stars in history.
Throughout the Hollywood and Movie industry, Gable, since the height of his career and, even today, has been called "The King of Hollywood." And with good reason.
He had an amazing career that spanned thirty years in which he made a total of sixty-seven films. He was the true King of Hollywood, a magnificent actor, and a true charismatic prescence. Even today, almost half a century after his death, his name lives on. Truly one of the Hollywood Greats.
Against his father's wishes, Clark dropped out of High School in his third year, to work in a tire factory in Akron, Ohio. It was during this time that Clark fell in love with the theatre. He saw a production of "The Bird of Paradise" at the local playhouse and was so taken that he obtained an unsalaried position as a backstage call boy with the company.
After three fruitless years drifting from job to job he joined a theatre company in Portland, organized by an established ex-Broadway actress, Josephine Dillon, who became his acting coach and later, his wife. Gable later claimed it was a marriage of convenience and never consummated.
Gable made his first film appearance in 1924 as an extra in a silent film starring Pola Negri called "Forbidden Paradise." He changed his name to Clark Gable in 1925 and he continued to do extra work in silent films and well as stage roles.
Due to his size and ruggedness, Clark was constantly overlooked for leading roles. He became disenchanted with Hollywood, and Josephine, so he separated from her and in 1928 headed for the Broadway stages of New York.
In December, 1930 he was signed a two-year contract with MGM at $350 a week. In his dozen films released in 1931, he went from being unknown to a star. That same year, he stole the show in "A Free Soul," by slapping and pushing the star, Norma Shearer. It was actually a sequence suggested by Shearer's husband, MGM boss Irving Thalberg, in order to turn the audience against him. It did exactly the opposite. As Shearer recalled, "It was Clark who made villains popular. Instead of the audience wanting the good guy to get the girl, they wanted the heavy to win her." The next year, he became MGM's most important star after he played opposite Jean Harlow in "Red Dust."
With the exceptions of some occasional loan outs to other studios, he remained under contract at MGM studios for the next twenty-three years.
On January 25, 1936, he met his former co-star, Carole Lombard, at a formal Hollywood society party. They started to date and they soon fell in love with each other. They became the most popular couple in Hollywood.
On January 16, 1942, Lombard, who had just finished 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 traveling in crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Her 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 married twice more. "But he was never the same
He died in Los Angeles, California in November 1960, the result of a fourth heart attack. He had been in poor health from years of heavy smoking (three packs a day over thirty years) and drinking (he liked whiskey), and in the previous decade, had suffered two seizures which may have been heart attacks.
