William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio, to Adeline (Hershelman) and William Henry Gable, an oil-well driller. He was of German, Irish, and Swiss-German descent. When he was seven months old, his mother died, and his father sent him to live with his maternal aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania, where he stayed until he was two. His father then returned to take him back to Cadiz. At 16, he quit high school, went to work in an Akron, Ohio, tire factory, and decided
to become an actor after seeing the play "The Bird of Paradise." He
toured in stock companies, worked oil fields and sold ties. On December 13, 1924, he married Josephine Dillon, his acting coach and 15 years his senior. Around that time, they moved to Hollywood, so that Clark could concentrate on his acting career. In April 1930, they divorced and a year later, he married Maria Langham (a.k.a. Maria Franklin Gable), also about 17 years older than him.
While Gable acted on stage, he became a lifelong friend of Lionel Barrymore. After several failed screen
tests (for Barrymore and Darryl F. Zanuck), Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's
Irving Thalberg. He had a small part in Feindschaft (1931) which starred William Boyd. Joan Crawford asked for him as co-star in Irrwege des Lebens (1931) and the public
loved him manhandling Norma Shearer in Der Mut zum Glück (1931) the same year. His unshaven
lovemaking with bra-less Jean Harlow in Dschungel im Sturm (1932) made him MGM's most
important star.
His acting career then flourished. At one point, he refused an assignment, and the studio
punished him by loaning him out to (at the time) low-rent Columbia
Pictures, which put him in Frank Capra's Es geschah in einer Nacht (1934), which won him an Academy Award for his performance. The next year saw a starring role in Goldfieber (1935) with Loretta Young, with whom he had an affair (resulting in the birth of a daughter, Judy Lewis).
He returned to far more substantial roles at MGM, such as Fletcher
Christian in Meuterei auf der Bounty (1935) and Rhett Butler in Vom Winde verweht (1939).
After divorcing Maria Langham, in March 1939 Clark married Carole Lombard, but tragedy struck in January 1942 when the plane in which Carole and her mother were flying crashed into Table Rock Mountain, Nevada, killing them both. A grief-stricken Gable joined the US Army Air Force and was off the screen for three years, flying combat missions in Europe. When he returned the studio regarded his salary as excessive and did not renew
his contract. He freelanced, but his films didn't do well at the box
office. He married Sylvia Ashley, the widow of Douglas Fairbanks, in 1949. Unfortunately this marriage was short-lived and they divorced in 1952. In July 1955 he married a former sweetheart, Kathleen Williams Spreckles (a.k.a. Kay Williams) and became stepfather to her two children, Joan and Adolph ("Bunker") Spreckels III.
On November 16, 1959, Gable became a grandfather when Judy Lewis, his daughter with Loretta Young, gave birth to a daughter, Maria. In 1960, Gable's wife Kay discovered that she was expecting their first child. In early November 1960, he had just completed filming Misfits - Nicht gesellschaftsfähig (1961), when he suffered a heart attack, and died later that month, on November 16, 1960. Gable was buried shortly afterwards 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.
