Kerol Lombard Actress Date of Birth: 06.10.1908 Country: USA

1. Biography of Carole Lombard
2. Early Career and Marriage
3. Rise to Stardom
4. Best Films and Personal Life
5. Tragic End

Biography of Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard was born on October 6, 1908, in Indiana, USA. Her real name was Jane Alice Peters. She moved to California at the age of 6. When she was 12, she was noticed by director Allan Dwan during a children's baseball game and was given a role in the film "A Perfect Crime" in 1921. Soon after, she became interested in amateur theater and started playing small roles in movies, mostly in westerns, starting in 1925. In 1926, she was involved in a car accident and required plastic surgery to remove scars from the left side of her face. The studio "Fox" terminated her contract and she began working with Mack Sennett, starring in 13 short films alongside popular comedians at the time.

Early Career and Marriage

After her time with Mack Sennett, Lombard started receiving more significant roles and signed a contract with Paramount in 1930. A few months later, she married actor William Powell, who was 16 years older than her (they divorced in 1933 but remained friends). In 1932, she acted alongside her future husband, Clark Gable, in the film "No Man of Her Own." Among her early sound films, notable ones include the mystical thriller "Supernatural" (1933) and the anti-war film "The Eagle and the Hawk" (1933).

Rise to Stardom

Lombard's star rose rapidly in Hollywood when she appeared alongside John Barrymore in Howard Hawks' screwball comedy "Twentieth Century" in 1934. Her character, capricious, temperamental, and eccentric, became the epitome of one of the decade's key female roles, and Lombard played her best subsequent roles in this genre. Her screen presence was characterized by extraordinary dynamism; she was constantly in motion, where other actresses merely posed for close-ups. With her physicality and humor conveyed through movement, she was ahead of her time and is considered one of the most "modern" actresses of old Hollywood.

Best Films and Personal Life

Some of Lombard's best films include the comedies "Hands Across the Table" (1935, directed by Mitchell Leisen), "My Man Godfrey" (1936, directed by Gregory La Cava), and the satirical farce "Nothing Sacred" (1937, directed by William Wellman). She brilliantly parodied Greta Garbo in the film "The Princess Comes Across" (1936). In 1939, she starred in the melodramas "Made for Each Other" and "In Name Only," alongside James Stewart and Cary Grant, respectively. In the same year, she married Clark Gable. Everyone she worked with loved her for her professionalism, brilliant wit, ability to joke and pull pranks, kindness, and genuine attention to even the most insignificant members of the production crew. She adored practical jokes and, when elected honorary mayor of Culver City, where the Columbia studio was located, she annoyed the studio bosses by declaring a day off for all employees.

Tragic End

Her marriage to Gable was happy, and her career was at its peak by the early 1940s. She starred in Alfred Hitchcock's comedy "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" (1941) and Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece "To Be or Not to Be" (1942). However, during her trip across the country to promote war bond sales, the plane she was traveling in with her mother crashed under unknown circumstances, resulting in her tragic death.