Before Hollywood, Clark Gable spent a season in Astoria
Photo: Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, in 1901 and drifted through a series of jobs and theater work in his late teens. In the early 1920s, he joined a traveling stock company that toured the Northwest, and the troupe ended up in Astoria.
The company played in Astoria’s theaters during a time when the town was rebuilding after the 1922 fire. Gable worked in local lumber mills and at other jobs to support himself when acting didn’t pay. He was in love with Franz Dorfler, an actress in the company, and followed her to Portland when the company folded.
Meeting his coach
In Portland, Gable met Josephine Dillon, a theater director and acting coach who had worked in New York. She worked with him on his voice, posture and stage presence. She was older than he was, and they married in 1924 and moved to Hollywood, where she continued to coach him.
Gable got a series of stage and film parts in the late 1920s and broke through in the early 1930s with MGM. He won the Academy Award for It Happened One Night in 1935 and became one of the most famous film stars in the world as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind in 1939.
Local memory
Astoria has kept the connection alive in small ways, with local historians pointing to the places he worked and performed. Gable’s time in the Northwest is a reminder that the region’s small theater circuit was once a training ground for actors who went on to much bigger stages. He died in 1960.
By 
By 
,_(1920s).jpg){kind=link}