American actor and top star called “the King,” Hollywood’s quintessential masculine star. He played in a stock company at 19 and on Broadway in “What Price Glory,” 1924. His first film was in 1930, “The Painted Desert.” Other films included “Mutiny on the Bounty,” Oscar winner “It Happened One Night,” and “Gone With the Wind,” in which he was the perfect Rhett Butler.
In WW II he served in the USAF. Gable was married five times. He married his first wife, Josephine Dillon, in 1924. In 1930, Gable and Dillon were divorced. He later married his second wife, Texas socialite Maria Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham (nicknamed “Rhea”). The couple divorced on March 7, 1939. On March 29, 1939, during a production break on Gone with the Wind, Gable married his third wife, Carole Lombard. Lombard died in a plane crash on January 16, 1942. In 1949, Gable married Sylvia Ashley, a British model and actress previously married to Douglas Fairbanks; the couple divorced in 1952.
In 1955, Gable married his fifth wife, Kay Spreckels (née Kathleen Williams), a thrice-married former fashion model and actress who had previously been married to sugar-refining heir Adolph B. Spreckels Jr. On March 20, 1961, Kay Gable gave birth to Gable’s only son, John Clark Gable, at the same hospital in which her husband had died four months earlier. Marilyn Monroe attended John Clark’s baptism. John Clark had two children: Kayley Gable (born 1986) and Clark James Gable (born September 20, 1988).
During the filming of The Call of the Wild in early 1935, the film’s lead actress, Loretta Young, became pregnant with Gable’s child. Their daughter, Judy, was born on November 6, 1935.
“The Misfits” was wrapped on 11/04/1960 at Paramount Studios. It was the most expensive black-and-white film ever made, and gave Gable a salary of $800,000. It had been a difficult production with an unstable Marilyn Monroe and long hours in 100-degree heat. The day after the film closed, Gable had chest pains and that night, complained of a headache and indigestion. Taken to the hospital he recovered enough to listen to the heartbeat of the baby that Kay was carrying. On the night of 11/16/1960, his doctor looked in on him at 10:50 PM. He looked up from the magazine he was reading, flipped a page, and slumped back, dead of a final cardiac thrombosis, Hollywood, CA.
Link to Wikipedia biography