Carole Lombard (October 6, 1908 - January 16, 1942) was an American actress. She was born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
She made her film debut at the age of 12 in A Perfect Crime (1921) (There has been some speculation that she was actually a few years older than her given birthdate). In the 1920s she worked in several low-budget productions. In some of her early movies she was credited as Jane Peters, and then as Carol Lombard. In 1925 she was signed as a contract player with 20th Century Fox. She also worked for Mack Sennett and Pathé Pictures. She became a well known actress and managed to make a smooth transition to sound films, starting with High Voltage (1929). In 1930 she began working as for Paramount Pictures.
Carole Lombard became one of Hollywood's top comedy actresses in the 1930s. It was a comedy, My Man Godfrey (1936) for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination.
She married actor William Powell in 1931; they divorced two years later. She married Clark Gable in 1939.
Carole Lombard was killed in a airplane crash in Nevada when returning from a war bond tour in 1942. Just before boarding the plane in Indiana, she 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. The Liberty ship SS Lombard was named for her, and Gable attended its launching on January 15 1944.
Her final film, To Be or Not to Be, was in post-production at the time of her death. Its producers decided to cut part of the film in which her character asks, "What can happen in a plane?"
Carol Lombard was a second generation Baha'i who formally declared her membership of the Baha'i Faith in 1938.1
She is interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Although Gable remarried, he was buried next to her.
Notes
- The Baha'i World 1940-1944 pp.635. Baha'i Publishing Trust, Wilmette