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William Clark Gable (February 1, 1901 – November 16, 1960) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. He has been nicknamed "The King of Hollywood." His most famous role was in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh.

Early life
In 1924, with Josephine's financial aid, the two went to Hollywood, where she became his manager and first wife. Although he found work as an extra and bit player in such silent films as The Plastic Age (1925), which starred Clara Bow, Gable was not offered any major roles and so he returned to the stage, becoming lifelong friends with Lionel Barrymore. In 1930, after his impressive appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the play The Last Mile, he was offered a contract with MGM. Gable's first role in a sound picture was as the villain in a low-budget William Boyd western called The Painted Desert (1931). He received a lot of fan mail as a result of his powerful voice and appearance; the studio took notice.
In 1930, Clark and Josephine Dillon were divorced. A few days later, he married Texas socialite Ria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham. After moving to California, they were married again in 1931, possibly due to differences in state legal requirements.
"His ears are too big and he looks like an ape." So said Warner Bros. executive Darryl F. Zanuck about Clark Gable after testing him for the lead in Warner's gangster drama Little Caesar (1931).
In the following years, he acted in a succession of enormously popular pictures, earning him the undisputed title of "King of Hollywood." Throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s, he was arguably the world's biggest movie star.　
Gable had a reputation as an outdoorsman. At first, it was an image conceived by the MGM publicity department, but Gable found that he liked the lifestyle, and spent time in the outdoors whenever he could.

Hollywood

Most famous roles
According to urban legend, Gable was lent to Columbia Pictures, then considered a second-rate operation, as punishment for refusing roles; however, this has been refuted by more recent biographies. MGM did not have a project ready for Gable and was paying him $2000 per week, under his contract, to do nothing. Studio head Louis B. Mayer lent him to Columbia for $2500 per week, making a $500 per week profit.
The unpublished memoirs of animator Friz Freleng's mention that this was one of his favorite films. It has been claimed that it helped inspire the cartoon character Bugs Bunny. Four things in the film may have coalesced to create Bugs: the personality of a minor character, Oscar Shapely and his penchant for referring to Gable's character as "Doc", an imaginary character named "Bugs Dooley" that Gable's character uses to frighten Shapely, and most of all, a scene in which Clark Gable eats carrots while talking quickly with his mouth full, as Bugs does.
Gable also earned an Academy Award nomination when he portrayed Fletcher Christian in 1935's Mutiny on the Bounty. Gable once said that this was his favorite film of his own.

It Happened One Night
Despite his reluctance to play the role, Gable is best known for his performance in Gone with the Wind (1939), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Gable was an almost immediate favorite for the role of Rhett Butler with both the public and producer David O. Selznick. But as Selznick had no male stars under long-term contract, he needed to go through the process of negotiating to borrow an actor from another studio. Gary Cooper was thus Selznick's first choice.
Decades later, Gable would say that whenever his career would start to fade, a re-release of Gone with the Wind would instantly revive everything, and he continued as a top leading man for the rest of his life. In addition, Gable was one of the few actors to play the lead in three films that won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Gone with the Wind
Gable's marriage in 1939 to his third wife, successful actress Carole Lombard, was the happiest period of his personal life. They purchased a ranch at Encino and once Clark had become accustomed to her often blunt way of expressing herself, they found they had much in common. This was despite the fact that Gable was a conservative Republican and Lombard a liberal Democrat.
On January 16, 1942, Lombard, who had just finished her 57th film, To Be Or Not To Be, was on a tour to sell war bonds when the twin-engine DC-3 she was traveling in crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas. Upon hearing the news, Gable flew to the scene and had to be forcibly restrained from climbing the snowcapped mountain himself in an effort to rescue her.

Marriage to Carole Lombard
In 1942, following Lombard's death, Gable joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. As Captain Clark Gable, he trained with and accompanied the 351st Heavy Bomb Group as head of a 6-man motion picture unit making a gunnery training film. While at RAF Polebrook, England, Gable flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts. Adolf Hitler esteemed Gable above all other actors, and during the Second World War, offered a sizable reward to anyone who could capture and bring Gable unscathed to him. He left the Army Air Forces with the rank of major.

World War II
Gable's first movie after returning from service in WWII was the 1945 production of Adventure. It was a critical and commercial failure. However, Gable was acclaimed for his performance in The Hucksters (1947). That was followed by the popular success of Never Let Me Go (1953), opposite Gene Tierney. Tierney was a favorite of Gable and he was very disappointed when she was replaced in Mogambo (due to her mental health problems) by Grace Kelly. Mogambo (1953) was a Technicolor remake of his earlier film Red Dust, which had been a even greater success.
Gable became increasingly unhappy with what he considered mediocre roles offered him by MGM, while the studio regarded his salary as excessive. In 1953, he refused to renew his contract, and began to work independently. But his subsequent films did not do well at the box office.
Gable's last film was The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. This was also the final film completed by Monroe. Many critics regard Gable's performance to be his finest.
In 1949, Clark married Sylvia Ashley, a British divorcée and the widow of Douglas Fairbanks. The relationship was profoundly unsuccessful; they divorced in 1952.
Gable's fifth wife, whom he married in 1955 after an on-again, off-again affair spanning thirteen years, was Kay Spreckels (full name Kathleen Williams Capps de Alzaga Spreckels), a thrice-married former fashion model and stock actress.

After World War II
Gable had a daughter, Judy Lewis (b. 1935), the result of an affair with actress Loretta Young begun on the set of The Call of the Wild (1935). In an elaborate scheme, Young took an extended vacation and went to Europe to hide the fact that she was pregnant. After a few months she came back to California and gave birth to their child in Venice. Nineteen months after the birth, Loretta claimed to have adopted Judy (a gambit that got less believable when the child grew to look much like her mother, with ears sticking out like Gable's).
According to Lewis, Gable visited her home once, but he didn't tell her that he was her father. While neither Gable nor Young would ever publicly acknowledge their daughter's real parentage, this fact was so widely known that in Lewis's autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, she wrote that she was shocked to learn of it from other children at school. Loretta Young would never officially acknowledge the fact, which she said would be the same as admitting to a "venial sin". However, she finally gave her biographer permission to include it only on the condition the book not be published until after her death.
On March 20, 1961, Kay Spreckels gave birth to Gable's son, John Clark Gable, born four months after Clark's death. She also had two children from her third marriage, Joan and Adolph Spreckels III (nicknamed "Bunker").

Children
He died in Los Angeles, California in November 1960, the result of a fourth heart attack. There was much speculation that Gable's physically demanding Misfits role, which required yanking on and being dragged by horses, contributed to his sudden death soon after filming was completed. In a widely reported quote, Gable's wife Kay blamed it on stress caused by "the endless waiting... waiting (for Monroe)". Monroe, on the other hand, claimed that she and Kay had become close during the filming and would refer to Clark as "Our Man".
Gable is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California, beside Carole Lombard.