100 Years of Movie Posters: Carole Lombard

Saturday, 14 June 2014

Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard (born Jane Alice Peters 1908-1942) was an American film actress. She was particularly noted for her zany, energetic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s.

Lombard began appearing in comedies with William Powell such as Man of the World and Ladies Man, and married him in June 1931. The marriage to Powell increased Lombard's fame, and the two would continue to occasionally star together throughout the 1930s, despite being divorced in 1933. Lombard starred alongside Clark Gable (whom she married in 1939) in No Man of Her Own (1932) and George Raft in Bolero (1934), where her dance skills were praised.

She also starred in Twentieth Century (1934), Hands Across the Table (1935), which was the first of four comedies made with Fred MacMurray, My Man Godfrey (1936), which won her an Academy Award nomination opposite Powell, and Nothing Sacred (1937).

Lombard's career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in an aircraft crash on Mount Potosi, Nevada while returning from a World War II War Bond tour, 22 people lost their lives including Lombards mother.

Her final film, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), a satire about Nazism and the war, was in post-production at the time of her death. Today she is remembered as one of the definitive actresses of the screwball comedy genre, and ranks among the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time. The World War II Liberty Ship SS Carole Lombard and the Carole Lombard Memorial Bridge over the St. Mary's River near Fort Wayne were named after her. [Wikipedia]