Clark Gable

“The King of Hollywood, with the pencil to prove it.”

90STACH SCORE

✂ Pencil Celebrity Era: 1930s Born 1901 🏆 HOF Inductee

Is this a Legendary Stach?

Stach Stats

Stash Power68

Ruggedness80

Curl Factor5

Legend Status98

Stats are for entertainment purposes. The mustache committee's decisions are final and occasionally arbitrary.

Style: Pencil
Peak Era: 1930s
Born: 1901
Hall of Fame: Inducted 2024
Fan Votes: 0 legendary · 0 meh

The Story

About Clark Gable

William Clark Gable (1901–1960) was born in Cadiz, Ohio, and worked in oil fields, lumber camps, and tire factories before stage work led him to Hollywood. MGM signed him in 1930 and initially had no idea what to do with a leading man whose ears stuck out. Audiences figured it out before the studio did.

It Happened One Night (1934) won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and San Francisco (1936) made him the biggest male star in the world, and in 1938 a newspaper poll crowned him "the King of Hollywood," a title that stuck for the rest of his life. Then came Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind (1939), and the matter was settled permanently.

Following the death of his wife Carole Lombard in a 1942 plane crash, Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and flew combat missions over Europe as an aerial gunner and filmmaker. He returned to pictures after the war and finished his career with The Misfits (1961), opposite Marilyn Monroe, released after his death.

The Verdict

Why the Stach Became Iconic

Gable's pencil mustache is the most elegant thing ever to sit on an American leading man. Thin, precise, and perfectly parallel to a grin that could sell anything, it turned the mustache from a sign of villainy (silent-movie bad guys) into a sign of sophistication.

For two decades, if a man wanted to look like a movie star, he drew a straight line on his upper lip and hoped for the best. Most of them looked like waiters. Gable looked like the King.

On the Record

Appearances

Red Dust (1932)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
San Francisco (1936)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Mogambo (1953)
The Misfits (1961)

Fun Facts

He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for It Happened One Night (1934).
Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942 and flew combat missions with the Eighth Air Force.
Warner Bros. cartoonists caricatured him so often that Bugs Bunny's carrot-chomping was reportedly inspired by a Gable scene in It Happened One Night.
He was billed as "the King of Hollywood" after a 1938 newspaper poll, and the nickname lasted the rest of his life.
Gone with the Wind (1939) remains, adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film of all time.