William Clark Gable

William Clark Gable
William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Adeline and William Henry Gable, who was an oil-well driller. He was of German, Irish and Swiss-German descent. His mother died, when he was seven months old and his father sent him Pennsylvania to live with his maternal aunt and uncle, where he stayed at the age of two. After that his father took him back to Cadiz. When he was 16 years old, he left high school to work in an Akron, Ohio, tire factory. He decided to become an actor after seeing the play "The Bird of Paradise". He toured in stock companies, sold ties and worked in oil fields. On December 13, 1924, he married to his acting coach Josephine Dillon, who was 15 years senior to him. Ater marriage they moved to Hollywood, so that he could concentrate on his acting career. In April 1930, they divorced and a year later, he again married to Maria Langham, who was about 17 years older than him. He became a friend of Lionel Barrymore during stage performance. He was cast in 1930 by MGM's Irving Thalberg, after many screen tests. In 1931, he performed a small role in The Painted Desert. Joan Crawford cast him as co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance in 1931 and the public loved him manhandling as Norma Shearer in A Free Soul in the same year. In 1932, his unshaven lovemaking with Jean Harlow in "Red Dust" made him MGM's most important star. Once he refused an assignment and the studio punished him by loaning him out to low-rent Columbia Pictures, which led him in Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" in 1934 and won him an Academy Award for his performance. The next year he appeared in "The Call of the Wild" with Loretta Young, with whom he had an affair which resulting in the birth of a daughter, Judy Lewis. After that he returned at MGM to act in roles, such as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939). He divorced Maria Langham in March 1939, and married to Carole Lombard. In January 1942, Carole and her mother were flying in a plane which was crashed into Table Rock Mountain, Nevada, killing them both. He joined the U.S Army Air Force and was off the screen for three years, flying combat missions in Europe. AFter that he returned the studio and freelanced, but his films could not do well at the box office. He married Silvia Ashley, the widow of Douglas Fairbanks in 1949. Unfortunately this marriage was also short-lived and they divorced in 1952. In July 1955, he married a former sweetheart, Kathleen Williams Spreckles. On November 16, 1959, Gable became a grandfather when his daughter Judy Lewis, gave birth to a daughter, Maria. In 1960, his wife Kay discovered that she was expecting their first child. In November 1960, he had just completed filming The Misfits (1961), when he suffered a heart attack and died later that month, on November 16, 1960. He was buried in the shrine that he had built for Carole Lombard and her mother when they died, at Forest Lawn Cemetery. In March 1961, Kay Gable gave birth to a boy, whom she named John Clark Gable after his father.