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Clark Gable (1 February 1901–16 November 1960) was an iconic American actor nicknamed "The King of Hollywood" in his heyday. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time.

Gable's most famous role was Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he had won the award for It Happened One Night (1934) and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Other memorable performance were in Run Silent, Run Deep, a classic submarine film, and his final film The Misfits (1961), which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe in one of her last roles.

In his long film career, Gable was paired with some of the best and most popular actresses of the time. Joan Crawford, who was his favorite actress to work with,^[1] was partnered with Gable in eight films, Myrna Loy was with him seven times, and he played opposite Jean Harlow in six productions. He also starred with Lana Turner in four features, and with Norma Shearer in three.

Contents 1 Career 1.1 Stage and silent films 1.2 Early successes 1.3 Rising star 1.4 Gone with the Wind 2 References 2.1 Notes 2.2 Bibliography 3 External links

[edit] Career

[edit] Stage and silent films

In 1924, with Dillon's financial aid, the two went to Hollywood, where she became his manager and first wife. He changed his stage name from W. C. Gable to Clark Gable.^[2] He found work as an extra in such silent films as The Plastic Age (1925), which starred Clara Bow, and Forbidden Paradise, plus a series of two-reel comedies called The Pacemakers. He also appeared as a bit player in a series of shorts. However, Gable was not offered any major roles and so he returned to the stage, becoming lifelong friends with Lionel Barrymore, who in spite of his bawling Gable out for amateurish acting at first, urged Gable to pursue a career on stage.^[3] During the 1927-28 theater season, Gable acted with the Laskin Brothers Stock Company in Houston, where he played many roles, gained considerable experience and became a local matinee idol. Gable then moved to New York and Dillon sought work for him on Broadway. He received good reviews in Machinal; "He's young, vigorous and brutally masculine," said the Morning Telegraph.^[4] The start of the Great Depression and the beginning of talking pictures caused a cancellation of many plays in the 1929-30 season and acting work became harder to get.

[edit] Early successes

In 1930, after his impressive appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the play The Last Mile, Gable was offered a contract with MGM. His 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 lot of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and appearance; the studio took notice.

In 1930, Gable and Josephine Dillon were divorced. A few days later, he married Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they were married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal requirements.

"His ears are too big and he looks like an ape," said Warner Bros. executive Darryl F. Zanuck about Clark Gable after testing him for the lead in Warner's gangster drama Little Caesar (1931).^[5] After several failed screen tests for Barrymore and Zanuck, Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's Irving Thalberg. He became a client of well-connected agent Minna Wallis, sister of producer Hal Wallis and very close friend of Norma Shearer.

Gable's timing in arriving in Hollywood was excellent as MGM was looking to expand its stable of male stars and he fit the bill. Gable then worked mainly in supporting roles, often as the villain. MGM's publicity manager Howard Strickland developed Gable's studio image, playing up his he-man experiences and his 'lumberjack in evening clothes' persona. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM frequently paired him with well-established female stars. Joan Crawford asked for him as her co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). He built his fame and public visibility in such important movies as A Free Soul (1931), in which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer (Gable never played a supporting role again after that slap). The Hollywood Reporter wrote "A star in the making has been made, one that, to our reckoning, will outdraw every other star... Never have we seen audiences work themselves into such enthusiasm as when Clark Gable walks on the screen".^[6] He followed that with Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931) with Greta Garbo, and Possessed (1931), in which he and Joan Crawford (then married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) steamed up the screen with some of the passion they shared for decades to come in real life. Adela Rogers St. John later dubbed the relationship as "the affair that nearly burned Hollywood down."^[7] Louis B. Mayer threatened to terminate both their contracts and for a while they kept apart and Gable shifted his attentions to Marion Davies. On the other hand, Gable and Garbo disliked each other. She thought he was a wooden actor while he considered her a snob.

[edit] Rising star

Gable was considered for the role of Tarzan but lost out to Johnny Weissmuller's better physique and superior swimming prowess. Gable's unshaven lovemaking with bra-less Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932) made him MGM's most important star. After the hit Hold Your Man (1933), MGM recognized the goldmine of the Gable-Harlow pairing, putting them in two more films, China Seas (1935) and Wife vs. Secretary (1936). An enormously popular combination, on-screen and off-screen, Gable and Jean Harlow made six films together, the most notable being Red Dust (1932) and Saratoga (1937). Harlow died of kidney failure during production of Saratoga. Ninety percent completed, the remaining scenes were filmed with long shots or doubles; Gable would say that he felt as if he were "in the arms of a ghost".^[8]

According to legend, Gable was lent to Columbia Pictures, then considered a second-rate operation, as punishment for refusing roles; however, this has been refuted by more recent biographies. MGM did not have a project ready for Gable and was paying him $2000 per week, under his contract, to do nothing. Studio head Louis B. Mayer lent him to Columbia for $2500 per week, making a $500 per week profit.^[9]

Gable was not the first choice to play the lead role of Peter Warne in It Happened One Night. Robert Montgomery was originally offered the role, but he felt that the script was poor.^[10] Filming began in a tense atmosphere,^[9] but both Gable and Frank Capra enjoyed making the movie.

A persistent legend has it that Gable had a profound effect on men's fashion, thanks to a scene in this movie. As he is preparing for bed, he takes off his shirt to reveal that he is bare-chested. Sales of men's undershirts across the country allegedly declined noticeably for a period following this movie.^[11]

Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his 1934 performance in the film. He returned to MGM a bigger star than ever.^[12]

The unpublished memoirs of animator Friz Freleng's mention that this was one of his favorite films. It has been claimed that it helped inspire the cartoon character Bugs Bunny. Four things in the film may have coalesced to create Bugs: the personality of a minor character, Oscar Shapely and his penchant for referring to Gable's character as "Doc", an imaginary character named "Bugs Dooley" that Gable's character uses to frighten Shapely, and most of all, a scene in which Clark Gable eats carrots while talking quickly with his mouth full, as Bugs does.^[13]

Gable also earned an Academy Award nomination when he portrayed Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. Gable once said that this was his favorite film of his own, despite the fact that he did not get along with his co-stars Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone.

In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures, earning him the undisputed title of "King of Hollywood" in 1938. The title 'King' was first offered by Spencer Tracy, probably in jest but soon Ed Sullivan started a poll in his newspaper column and more than 20 million fans voted Gable 'King' and Myrna Loy 'Queen' of Hollywood. Though the honorific certainly helped his career, Gable grew tired of it and later stated, "This 'King' stuff is pure bullshit...I'm just a lucky slob from Ohio. I happened to be in the right place at the right time".^[14]Throughout most of the 1930s and the early 1940s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.

[edit] Gone with the Wind

Despite his reluctance to play the role, Gable is best known for his performance in Gone with the Wind (1939), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Carole Lombard may have been the first to suggest that he play Rhett (and she play Scarlett) when she bought him a copy of the bestseller which he refused to read.^[15]

Gable was an almost immediate favorite for the role of Rhett Butler with both the public and producer David O. Selznick. But as Selznick had no male stars under long-term contract, he needed to go through the process of negotiating to borrow an actor from another studio. Gary Cooper was Selznick's first choice.^[16] When Cooper turned down the role, he was quoted as saying, "Gone With The Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his nose, not me".^[17] By then, Selznick was determined to get Gable, and eventually found a way to borrow him from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Gable was wary of potentially disappointing a public who had decided no one else could play the part. He later conceded, "I think I know now how a fly must react after being caught in a spider's web".^[18] It was his first film in Technicolor. Also appearing in Gone With The Wind in the role of "Aunt Pittypat" was Laura Hope Crews, the friend in Portland who had coaxed Gable back into the theater.

During filming, Vivien Leigh complained about his bad breath, which was apparently caused by false teeth. They otherwise got along well.^[19] His most famous line was his closing, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."^[20]

Gable didn't want to shed tears for the scene after Scarlett (Leigh) has a miscarriage. Olivia de Havilland made him cry, later commenting, "... Oh, he would not do it. He would not! Victor (Fleming) tried everything with him. He tried to attack him on a professional level. We had done it without him weeping several times and then we had one last try. I said, "You can do it, I know you can do it and you will be wonderful ..." Well, by heaven, just before the cameras rolled, you could see the tears come up at his eyes and he played the scene unforgettably well. He put his whole heart into it."^[21]

Decades later, Gable said 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. In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Gone with the Wind was given theatrical re-releases in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967 (in a widescreen version),^[22] 1971, 1989, and 1998.

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Harris, Warren G. (2002). Clark Gable: A Biography. New York: Harmony. ISBN 0609604953.
• Spicer, Chrystopher (2002). Clark Gable: Biography, Filmography, Bibliography. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1124-4.
• Bret, David (2007-09-10). Clark Gable: Tormented Star. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 078672093X.
• Clark Gable in the 8th Air Force, Air Power History, Spring 1999

[edit] External links

• Snopes on the false rumor of Gable killing a pedestrian while he was driving drunk
• Clark Gable in Thunderbolt! - Watch the entire movie online
• Combat America at the Internet Archive:
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
• Clark GABLE : Biographie, filmographie, galerie, etc