Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard
Background information
Born	Oct 6, 1908
Birth place:	Fort Wayne, Indiana
Born as	Jane Alice Peters
Died	Jan 16, 1942 - age  34
	Mount Potosi, near Las Vegas, Nevada
Spouse(s)	William Powell (1931-1933) Clark Gable (1939-1942)

Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 – January 16, 1942), born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was an Oscar-nominated American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in several classic films of the 1930s.

Ancestry and early life

Lombard's parents were Frederick C. Peters and Elizabeth Knight. Her paternal grandfather, John Claus Peters, was the son of German immigrants, Claus Peters and Caroline Catherine Eberlin. One distant branch of Lombard's mother's family originated in England; her ancestors John and Martha Cheney emigrated to North America in 1634.

Lombard was the youngest of three children. She spent her early childhood in a sprawling, two-story house at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne, near the St. Mary's River. Her parents divorced and her mother took the three children to Los Angeles in 1914, where Lombard attended Virgil Middle School and then Fairfax High School. She was elected "May Queen" in 1924. She quit school to pursue acting full-time, but graduated from Fairfax in 1927.

Lombard was a second generation Bahá'i who formally declared in 1938

Career

Lombard made her film debut at the age of twelve after she was seen playing baseball in the street by director Allan Dwan; he cast her as a tomboy in A Perfect Crime (1921). In the 1920s, she worked in several low-budget productions credited as 'Jane Peters', and then later as 'Carol Lombard'. In 1925, she was signed as a contract player with Fox Film Corporation (which merged with Daryl Zanuck's Twentieth Century Productions in 1935). She also worked for Mack Sennett and Pathé Pictures. She became a well-known actress and made a smooth transition to sound films, starting with High Voltage (1929). In 1930, she began working for Paramount Pictures.

Lombard became one of Hollywood's top comedy actresses in the 1930s. Despite her glamorous looks, she was a natural comedienne, and was not afraid to look silly for the sake of being funny. In comedies like Twentieth Century (1934) directed by Howard Hawks, My Man Godfrey (1936) directed by Gregory La Cava, and Nothing Sacred (1937) directed by William A. Wellman, she received praise from critics and was described as one of the key exponents of screwball comedy. However, she played a dramatic role in Vigil in the Night, starring as Nurse Anne Lee opposite Brian Aherne. Produced by David O. Selznick, Nothing Sacred was her only film made in Technicolor. Lombard was offered the role of Ellie Andrews in It Happened One Night (1934), but the filming schedule conflicted with that of Bolero and she was unable to accept.

• Carole Lombardi
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  in Fools For Scandal (1938)

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Personal life

In October 1930, Lombard met William Powell. They married on June 26, 1931. Lombard commented to fan magazines that she did not believe their sixteen-year age difference would present a problem, but friends felt they were ill-suited, as Lombard had an extroverted personality while Powell was more reserved. They divorced in 1933, but remained friends and worked together without acrimony, notably in My Man Godfrey. She was linked romantically to crooner Russ Columbo until his accidental death late in 1934.

Lombard carried on an affair with Clark Gable from the mid-1930s. The relationship had to be kept quiet because he was still married to his second wife, Ria. Gable was finally divorced from her on March 7, 1939. Gable and Lombard married shortly afterward on March 29. They bought a ranch in San Fernando Valley, California, previously owned by director Raoul Walsh. They called each other "Ma" and "Pa", and lived a happy, unpretentious life. To all who knew Gable, she was the love of his life.

Off-screen, Lombard was much loved for her unpretentious personality and well-known for her earthy sense of humor. She loved playing pranks during filming and once joked about her husband Clark Gable (widely acknowledged as the "King of Hollywood"), "If his pee-pee was one inch shorter, they'd be calling him the Queen of Hollywood."

Death

When the US entered World War II at the end of 1941, Lombard traveled to her home state of Indiana for a war bond rally. At four o'clock (04:00 local time) on the morning of Friday, January 16, 1942, Lombard and her mother boarded a Trans World Airlines DC-3 airplane to return to California. After refueling in Las Vegas, Flight 3 took off on a clear night. However, beacons in the area had been blacked out because of the war, and the plane was 6.7 miles (10.8 km) off course. Twenty-three minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed into "Double Up Peak" near the 8,300-foot (2500 meter) level of Mount Potosi, 32 miles (52 km) southwest of Las Vegas. All 22 passengers were killed. A plaque marked the spot but was stolen sometime in 2007.

Just before boarding the plane, Lombard addressed her fans, saying: "Before I say goodbye to you all, come on and join me in a big cheer! V for Victory!" President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who admired her patriotism, declared her the first woman killed in the line of duty during the war and posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Shortly after her death at the age of 33, Gable (who was inconsolable and devastated by her loss) joined the United States Army Air Forces, serving as a gunner on a bomber on combat missions over Europe. The Liberty ship SS Lombard was named for her and Gable attended its launch on January 15, 1944.

Lombard's final film, To Be or Not to Be, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-starring Jack Benny, a satire about Nazism and World War II, was in post-production at the time of her death. The film's producers decided to cut the part of the film in which her character asks "What can happen in a plane?" as they felt it was in poor taste, given the circumstances of Lombard's death. A similar editing instance happened when the 1940 Warner Brothers cartoon A Wild Hare was reissued. Lombard's name was originally mentioned in a game of "Guess Who" between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, but all reissue prints have the name dubbed over with Barbara Stanwyck's.

On January 18, 1942, Jack Benny did not perform his usual program, both out of respect for Lombard and grief at her death. Instead, he devoted his program to an all-music format.

At the time of her death, Lombard had been scheduled to star in the film They All Kissed The Bride; when production started, her role was given to Joan Crawford. Aware that she had received the role only because of Lombard's death, Crawford donated all of her pay for this film to the Red Cross.

Lombard is interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. The name on her crypt marker is "Carole Lombard Gable". Although Gable remarried, he was interred next to her when he died in 1960. Her mother, Elizabeth Peters, who also perished in the plane crash that killed her daughter, was interred on the other side of her.

Awards and honors

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Lombard 23rd on its list of the 50 greatest American female screen legends. She received one Academy Award for Best Actress nomination, for My Man Godfrey. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6930 Hollywood Blvd.

Lombard's Fort Wayne childhood home has been designated a historic landmark. The city named the nearby bridge over the St. Mary's River the "Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge."

External links

• Carole Lombard at the Internet Movie Database
• Carole Lombard at the Turner Classic Movie Database
• Carole Lombard: Biographie, filmographie, galerie, etc.
• Carole Lombard @ Find A Grave
• Photographs and bibliography

• Also see the page [ Carole Lombard ] on Wikipedia

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