Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960) was an iconic and legendary actor. He has been nicknamed "The King of Hollywood." His most famous role was in the 1939 epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. Gable and Joan Crawford were together in eight films, Myrna Loy was with him seven times, and Jean Harlow was with him six times. He also starred with Lana Turner in four features and with Norma Shearer in three. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time.

Clark Gable's mother died when he was seven months old. 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. In 1924 he reached Hollywood with the help of Portland, Oregon, theatre manager Josephine Dillon, who coached and later married him (she was 17 years his senior). After playing a few bit parts he returned to the stage, becoming lifelong friends with Lionel Barrymore. After several failed screen tests (for Barrymore and Darryl F. Zanuck), Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's Irving Thalberg. Joan Crawford (I) asked for him as co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931) and the public loved him manhandling Norma Shearer in Free Soul, A (1931) the same year. His unshaven lovemaking with bra-less Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932) made him MGM's most important star. 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 Oscar. 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). When his third wife Carole Lombard (I) died in a plane crash returning from a War Bond drive, 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 announced during filming of Misfits, The (1961) that, for the first time, he was to become a father. Two months later he died of a heart attack. He was laid to rest beside Carole Lombard at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

William Clark Gable was born on February 1, 1901 in Cadiz, Ohio. Later that year 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. When Clark was 16 he dropped out of school and worked at many odd jobs before joining a traveling theater company. 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, also about 15 years older than him. After working as an extra in various movies, he was offered a small part in the Painted Desert in 1931. From this point, his acting career flourished, and in 1934 he won an Academy Award for his performance in Frank Capra's classic It Happened One Night. The next year saw a starring role in The Call of the Wild with Loretta Young, with whom he had an affair (resulting in the birth of a daughter). Divorced in 1939, he later that same year starred in Gone With the Wind. 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. Clark then volunteered to be drafted and served in Europe for several years. After the war he continued with his film career and married Silvia 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 and became stepfather to her two children, Joan and Bunker, and in 1959 Kay discovered that she was expecting their first child. Several months prior to this Clark became a grandfather, when his daughter with Loretta Young gave birth in November 1959. In early November 1960, he had just completed filming The Misfits, when he suffered a heart attack, and died later that month. He was buried shortly afterwards in the shrine that he had built for Carole Lombard and her mother when they died. In March 1961 Kay Gable gave birth to a boy whom she named John Clark Gable after his father.