Gable became Hollywood's most bankable "King"
William Clark Gable, born 1 February 1901 and dead of a heart attack on 16 November 1960, anchored more than sixty films across thirty-seven years and topped Quigley's money-making poll sixteen times. An Oscar for It Happened One Night in 1934 and Rhett Butler sealed the King of Hollywood tag.
Born in Cadiz, Ohio, to oil driller Will Gable and Adeline Hershelman, he lost his mother at ten months. Baptized Catholic in Dennison, he was raised Methodist after his father refused Catholic upbringing; time on uncle Charles Hershelman's Pennsylvania farm eased the family fight. Stepmother Jennie Dunlap, wed in April 1903, polished the shy loud-voiced boy, taught piano, and watched him join Hopedale's town band at thirteen. A 1917 farm move near Akron ended when he fled for Firestone Tire work.
Seeing The Bird of Paradise at seventeen fixed an acting ambition; a three-hundred-dollar Hershelman trust at twenty-one funded the leap. After Oklahoma oil fields and Portland necktie sales, coach Josephine Dillon—seventeen years older, later his wife—fixed teeth, posture, and pitch before the 1924 Hollywood trip. Extra work in silent titles gave way to Houston stock idol status and a 1928 Machinal notice calling him brutally masculine. Pathé's The Painted Desert in 1931 was his first sound lead; Irving Thalberg then signed him at MGM for 650 dollars a week.
Pairings with Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow—especially Red Dust in 1932—made him MGM's premier romantic lead. Oscar nominations followed Mutiny on the Bounty and Gone with the Wind; Golden Globe nods came late for Teacher's Pet and But Not for Me. His last role was the aging cowboy in John Huston's The Misfits, released in 1961. AFI ranked him seventh among classic male legends in 1999. He died at fifty-nine.
Source: Clark Gable
