Actors - Clark Gable

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	Actors - Clark Gable

Clark Gable (February 1, 1901–November 16, 1960) was an American film actor and the biggest box office star of the early sound film era.

Early life

Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on 1 February 1901 to William H. Gable, an oil-well driller and prospector, and Adeline Hershelman. 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. (Spicer, Clark Gable, McFarland, pp. 7, 30)

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, 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.

After seeing a play which impressed him, he formed an ambition to be an actor, 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 a department store. While there he met the grandson of the 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 rigourous 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 desparate 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
(1931), in which he played a gangster who slapped Norma Shearer, 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 were sharing in real life. To bolster his rocketing popularity, MGM was now frequently pairing him with well-established female stars. 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 got a brilliant idea: loan 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.

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Actors - Clark Gable

Early life

Hollywood

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