Filmography
Does not include films in which he was an extra or the “Short Subject” films
1931
The Painted Desert
The Easiest Way
The Finger Points
The Secret Six
Laughing Sinners
Night Nurse
Sporting Blood
Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise)
Hell Divers
1932
Polly of the Circus
Strange Interlude
No Man of Her Own
1933
The White Sister
Hold Your Man
Night Flight
1934
Chained
Forsaking All Others
1935
After Office Hours
The Call of the Wild
1936
Cain and Mabel
Love on the Run
1937
Parnell
Saratoga
1938
Too Hot to Handle
1939
Idiot’s Delight
1940
Comrade X
1941
They Met in Bombay
Honky Tonk
1942
Somewhere I’ll Find You
1945
Adventure
1947
The Hucksters
1948
Homecoming
Command Decision
1949
Any Number Can Play
1950
Key to the City
To Please a Lady
1951
Across the Wide Missouri
Callaway Went Thataway
1952
Lone Star
1953
Never Let Me Go
1954
Betrayed
1955
Soldier of Fortune
The Tall Men
1956
The King and Four Queens
1957
Band of Angels
1958
Run Silent, Run Deep
Teacher’s Pet
1959
But Not for Me
1960
It Started in Naples
1961
The Misfits
Awards
He was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Leading Actor. He won once.
1934 – It Happened One Night – Won
1935 – Mutiny on the Bounty
1939 – Gone With The Wind
Clark Gable: Learn more about him, review his filmography and more
William Clark Gable was born February 1, 1901, in Cadiz, Ohio. His father was an oil driller and farmer; his mother died when he was an infant.
Gable dropped out of high school at 16 and went to work at a tire factory in Akron, Ohio. One evening he saw a play and enjoyed it so much that he decided to become an actor. He tried to work his way in by taking an unpaid job with a theater company, but his dream was temporarily derailed when his stepmother died in 1919 and he went to help his father in the oilfields of Oklahoma.
After three years in Oklahoma, he joined a traveling theater company, which went bankrupt, leaving Gable stranded in Montana. He hitchhiked to Oregon and joined another company, where he met Josephine Dillon, the theater manager. Dillon, a former actress and respected theater teacher 17 years his senior, took an interest in Gable. She became his acting coach and paid to have his teeth fixed and his hair and eyebrows styled. Before long they were married, and Gable and Dillon moved to Hollywood, California.
Gable was rejected at screen tests because casting agents thought his ears were too big for a leading man. He managed to land his first speaking role in a movie in The Painted Desert in 1931, and after seeing him on the big screen, MGM offered him a contract. His first leading role was in Dance, Fools, Dance , with Joan Crawford . Gable was a hit, and the studio began casting him as a roughneck villain opposite starlets including Jean Harlow , Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer . By the end of 1931, he had made a dozen films and launched his career as a leading man. He became sick of playing the bad guy and made his displeasure known.
During the filming of Dancing Lady in 1933, Gable developed pyorrhea, an infection in his gums that required immediate removal of nearly all his teeth. The infection spread through his body and reached his gallbladder, and he was hospitalized. Because of delays in filming and necessary re-shoots due to Gable’s illness, the film ran $150,000 over budget. When he returned to work, MGM loaned him to the then-low-budget Columbia Pictures for a Frank Capra comedy, It Happened One Night . It was widely rumored to have been punishment for either his bad attitude about his parts or the difficulty in shooting his last film, but in truth, MGM simply didn’t have a project for him. He ended up winning an Academy Award for It Happened One Night , and having shown his range, began being cast in a wider variety of roles.
Gable was now one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and he churned out a series of successful movies like Boomtown , San Francisco and Mutiny on the Bounty . In 1939 he appeared as Rhett Butler in his best-known film, the civil-war epic Gone with the Wind . He was dubbed the “King of Hollywood,” and was a symbol of masculinity, admired by men and adored by women.
Then, during filming of Somewhere I’ll Find You with Lana Turner in 1942, tragedy struck. Carole Lombard , Gable’s third wife and the love of his life, died in a plane crash. He was devastated. Disconsolate, he enlisted in the Army Air Force at age 41. He served as a tail-gunner on five bombing missions over Germany and made a propaganda film for the Army.
After his discharge in 1944, he returned to the big screen in Adventure . Though it was a lackluster flick, Gable’s return to film had people flocking to the box office. He continued to make movies with MGM, including Mogambo with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, but his career never regained the same momentum. When his studio contract expired in 1954, he became the highest-paid freelance actor of his day.
Gable’s status as a legend carried him, and he consistently made at least one movie a year, most notably Soldier of Fortune and The Tall Men . He gave what is considered to be one of his finest performances in The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift , but he never got to enjoy its success: Two days after they completed filming, Clark Gable suffered a heart attack. He died November 16, 1960.
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