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Birth Info
Clarl Gable was born in Cadiz Oh. When he was 7 months old his Mother died and he Father sent him to go live with his Aunt in Pennsylvania, where he stayed until he was two. When he later returned to Cadiz to live with his Father again he was 2 years old. -
Clark Drops
When Clark was 16 he dropped out of school and moved to Akron, Oh, to work in a tire factory. He dicided to become an actor after seeing the play "The Bird of Paradise". -
Clark over William
Clark bought and sold stock, for years after moving to Akron. He also continued to sell tires and also work in Oil Fields. After a few years in Akron he married his acting couch (15 years older than him) Josephine Dillon. Jose was the one that convince Gable to go by his middle name "Clark" instead of his first name "William". They then moved to Holleywood to gets Clarks acting career started. -
New Times
Clark got a divorce to is wife, Josephine Dillon. -
Climbing the latter
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 The Painted Desert (1931) in 1931. Joan Crawford asked for him as co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931) and the public loved him manhandling Norma Shearer in A Free Soul (1931) the same year. -
Fress Start
Less Than a Year after Clarks Divorce with Josephine, he remarries. Clark marries Maria Langham (a.k.a. Maria Franklin Gable). She was 17 years older than Clark roughly. -
Award Time
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 It Happened One Night (1934), which won him an Academy Award for his performance. -
Oops
The next year saw a starring role in The Call of the Wild (1935) with Loretta Young, with whom he had an affair (resulting in the birth of a daughter, Judy Lewis). -
Grind Time
He returned to far more substantial roles at MGM, such as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939). -
Sad Times
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. -
Flying High
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.
