Clark Gable

William Clark Gable was born February 1, 1901, and built a 37-year film career that made him one of Hollywood's most reliably bankable stars, landing on the industry's annual top-ten moneymaker list sixteen times. He took the Academy Award for Best Actor in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1934, then earned nominations for Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, the latter in 1939 becoming the performance that would define him. He worked opposite the era's major actresses - Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Marilyn Monroe - and kept going through more than sixty pictures across comedies, adventures, and dramas, picking up late-career Golden Globe nods for Teacher's Pet and But Not for Me. His last role was an aging cowboy in John Huston's The Misfits, released in 1961. He died of a heart attack on November 16, 1960, at fifty-nine.