On this day in 1938, Clark Gable reluctantly agrees to play Rhett Butler in David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind. Selznick had struck a deal with MGM to lend him Gable and co-finance the film in return for the rights to release the movie and keep half its profits.

Gable hesitated to take the role because he feared the production’s high profile would set impossible expectations for any actor playing Rhett Butler. The studio provided him a generous bonus, however, and he took the part, playing it with great success.

Gable was born in Ohio in 1901, the son of a farmer who later became an oil driller. Gable went to work at a tire factory in Akron, Ohio, at age 14. He began attending theater and started working as a backstage runner in the evenings but moved to Oklahoma with his father in his late teens to drill for oil. At age 21, he joined a traveling theater troupe, then worked as a lumberjack and salesman in Oregon before joining another troupe. He married the head of the troupe, who was 14 years his senior, in 1924, and the couple moved to Hollywood. Gable occasionally worked as a film extra but had no luck landing bigger roles, so he returned to live theater. He was cast in several successful Broadway productions, played a lead role in the Los Angeles production of a hit play in 1930, and landed a screen test-which he failed. He and his wife divorced the same year.

Finally, in 1931, he was cast as a villain in a western called The Painted Desert, and MGM signed him immediately. He stole the show in A Free Soul, with Norma Shearer and Lesley Howard, and married his second wife, a rich Texas socialite some 17 years his senior, the same year. In 1934, against his wishes, MGM lent him to Columbia to star in It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert. Both Colbert and Gable won Oscars for their performances in the film. Gable’s star rose and he became a big box-office draw. After divorcing his second wife, Gable began seeing Carole Lombard, whom he married in 1939 while filming Gone with the Wind. The marriage was considered one of Hollywood’s happiest but ended in tragedy when Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942, returning from a War Bond drive. Gable joined the air force shortly after her death, rose to the rank of major, and won several medals.

Gable returned to Hollywood in Adventure (1945), but his career had cooled. He allegedly began drinking heavily, and MGM dropped his contract. His last film, The Misfits (1961), seemed to promise a comeback, but he died of a heart attack before its release-and before the birth of his only child, John Gable, who was born to Gable’s fifth wife, Kay Spreckles, in 1960, shortly after Gable’s death.

(With thanks to History.com)