Most famous for his award-winning portrayal of dashing hero Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable was one of cinema’s biggest box office stars whose death on 16 November, 1960, left the screen a little less bright.

He was known throughout the industry as the undisputed King of Hollywood and ranked number 7 in the American Film Institute’s 1999 list of the Greatest Male Stars of All Time.

The American Civil War epic Gone with the Wind won an incredible eight Oscars. It became the first colour film to win the Best Picture award. In it Mr Gable uttered his famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’. His sudden death, in 1960, came days before the birth of his first son. America’s press broke the news to a shocked nation with the four-word headline, ‘The King is Dead.’

William Clark Gable was born of German ancestry on 1 February, 1901, in the Midwestern state of Ohio, USA.

Mistakenly listed as female on his birth certificate, his mother died when he was only seven months old and he went on to be raised by his father and stepmother. Mr Gable later described her as “one of the most tender human beings I’ve ever known”.

In 1917 the young Gable dropped out of high school to work in a tyre factory. However, a trip to the theatre to see the play The Bird of Paradise soon convinced him to take up work with several theatre companies and he eventually found himself in Portland, Oregon, where he married acting coach Josephine Dillon in 1924.

Hollywood soon beckoned and, after having his teeth fixed and undergoing plastic surgery on his ‘floppy ears’, he successfully found work as an extra in silent films. His stage career blossomed too, with an impressive performance in the play The Last Mile leading to a major contract with MGM in 1930.

The Painted Desert , a low-budget 1931 William Boyd western, became Mr Gable’s debut in a sound picture and made him a star overnight. The avalanche of fan mail which followed its release soon secured further roles for him in A Free Soul, Dance, Fools, Dance , and the sizzling romance Red Dust.

He would remain under contract at MGM for the next 23 years, although a loan out to Colombia Studios in 1934 signalled his first real box office smash with the groundbreaking screwball comedy It Happened One Night . He later took the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film and saw his salary at MGM jump to an impressive $4,000 a week.

His 1939 role as Rhett Butler in the classic Gone with the Wind further cemented his success and, by the dawn of the 1940s, he was one of the world’s most popular movie stars. However, World War Two briefly curtailed his career with a stint in the US Army Air Forces, eventually earning him the Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts.

After the war and two years away from Hollywood, he returned to the screen in 1947 with the acclaimed The Hucksters . This was soon followed by Mogambo , a lavish 1953 remake of Red Dust , which saw him revive his earlier lead role as big game hunter, Victor Marswell. The film also starred Grace Kelly .

His last film, The Misfits , is today regarded by many critics as his finest. Written by Arthur Miller and co-starring Marilyn Monroe , it was a production plagued by problems. Bored of waiting for Ms Monroe to turn up on set, he purportedly commented, “She damn near gave me a heart attack.” The next day, he suffered a massive heart attack, and died 11 days later on 16 November, 1960, in Los Angeles. He was 59.

Mr Gable is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in California, alongside his third wife, actress Carole Lombard, whose life was cut short in 1942 after the plane on which she was travelling crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas.