Clark Gable, (1901-1960),
American motion-picture actor, was 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).
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. He was loaned to Columbia Pictures to star in the
romantic comedy It Happened One Night (1934), the performance that won
him his only Academy Award. A string of successful roles followed. By
the end of the 1930s, he was the most popular actor in Hollywood and had
been accorded the nickname "The King."
In the early 1940s Gable
made a number of successful pictures. 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. Gable gave a
memorable performance in his last motion picture, The Misfits (1961),
filmed in Dayton, but by then he was exhausted and he died of a heart
attack within a few days of the film's completion.