Clark Gable.

Clark Gable. Clark Gable (1901-1960), American motion-picture actor, best known for his portrayal of Rhett Butler in the film Gone with the Wind. Born in Cadiz, Ohio, to an itinerant family, Gable dropped out of school early and held a variety of jobs. At the age of 21, he joined a traveling theatrical troupe, and for several years he toured in stock theater productions and worked intermittently in silent films. He performed once on Broadway, in Machinal (1928). His first real opportunity, however, came when he achieved critical success in a Los Angeles production of the play The Last Mile (1930). Although the screen tests that followed were unfruitful, Gable was eventually offered his first motion-picture role (as a villain) in a Western, The Painted Desert (1931). He was immediately in great demand, and he made a total of 12 films that year, including Sporting Blood (his first lead role), Free Soul, and Possessed. During the early 1930s, under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he worked for 23 years, Gable played opposite virtually every MGM female star--Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Myrna Loy--in such films as No Man of Her Own (1932), Red Dust (1932), Strange Interlude (1932), Dancing Lady (1933), and Manhattan Melodrama (1934). He was loaned to Columbia Pictures to star opposite Claudette Colbert in the romantic comedy It Happened One Night (1934), the performance that won him his only Academy Award. A string of successful roles followed, in such films as Call of the Wild (1935), China Seas (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), San Francisco (1936), Saratoga (1937), and Idiot's Delight (1939). By the end of the 1930s, he was the most popular actor in Hollywood and had been accorded the nickname "The King." When American producer David O. Selznick sought to cast him as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind (1939), Gable was initially not interested in the role, yet it was to become his most admired performance. Also that year, Gable married his sometime costar, Carole Lombard. In the early 1940s Gable made a number of successful pictures, such as Strange Cargo (1940), Boom Town (1940), and Honky Tonk (1941), but in 1942 Lombard died in a plane crash and Gable was deeply affected. Soon afterward, he enlisted in the United States Air Corps, serving as a major and flying numerous bombing missions during World War II (1939-1945). He returned to Hollywood, California, in 1945 having been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. Although Gable resumed his acting career, few of his pictures of the late 1940s and 1950s were particularly distinctive. Among the best of his performances during this period were those in The Hucksters (1947), Command Decision (1948), Across the Wide Missouri (1951), Mogambo (1953; a remake of Red Dust), Soldier of Fortune (1955), Teacher's Pet (1958), and Run Silent, Run Deep (1958). Gable gave a memorable performance in his last motion picture, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, but by then he was exhausted and he died of a heart attack within a few days of the film's completion. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.