On this day in 1960,actor Clark Gable, best known for his role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, dies.  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 the film.  The following year, Gable began seeing actress Carole Lombard shortly after he separated from his second wife. The couple married in 1939. Gable’s career flourished during this period, and he won his greatest role, as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, in 1939. 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.  Later, 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.