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Jean Harlow is one of most the defining figures of the early decades of American cinema. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 3, 1911, she made her feature film debut as an uncredited extra in the silent drama Honor Bound (1928). After a small speaking part in The Saturday Night Kid (1929), starring Clara Bow and Jean Arthur, she was hired by Howard Hughes to star in his World War I epic Hell's Angels (1930), which turned her into a overnight sensation. Signing with MGM in 1932, she became one of the studio's most profitable leading ladies, appearing in such hits as Dinner at Eight (1933), China Seas (1935), Wife vs. Secretary (1936) and Libeled Lady (1936), the last three co-starring Clark Gable . Her final picture, Saratoga (1937), which also paired her with Gable, was released after her death and became not only the highest-grossing film of her career, but also the biggest moneymaker of that year. Although she was in the motion picture industry for only nine year...

At the 3rd Academy Awards ceremony held at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on November 5, 1930, MGM's hugely successful prison drama The Big House (1930) earned writer Frances Marion an Oscar for Best Writing. Hoping that she would be inspired to repeat that accomplishment, Irving Thalberg, head of production at Metro, sent Marion to Chicago, Illinois, to research story ideas. While flicking through the pages of an edition of  The Saturday Evening Post , she found an article revealing that, in a city where people distrusted the police, a small group of leading citizens met in secret to arrange their own justice for criminals. Marion took inspiration from that story and wrote The Secret Six (1931), in which Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone, stars of The Big House , play two mobsters prosecuted by a half a dozen vigilantes. Thalberg was pleased with the leading roles Marion wrote for Beery and Stone, but asked if she could also fill out one of the minor leads for Cla...

Original release poster for Red Dust Wilson Collison's 1928 play Red Dust had been gathering quite a bit of dust of its own on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shelves since 1930 as a fifteen-page treatment of a «very purple melodrama about a poor little slaving whore.» At various times, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had been considered for the lead until screenwriter John Lee Mahin and producer Paul Bern settled on turning it into a comedy starring Jean Harlow and John Gilbert, with Jacques Feyder occupying the director's chair. Since Harlow's first film as an MGM contract player, Red-Headed Woman (1932), had proved to be just controversial enough to ensure its firm success, the studio figured that pairing her with Gilbert would help the former matinée idol's ailing image.   While Mahin was working on the script in late July 1932, he reportedly saw Clark Gable in William A. Wellman's Night Nurse (1931) or George W. Hill's Hell Divers (1932), dependi...

Jean Harlow is one of the most iconic figures of the early decades of American cinema. She was born  with the given name of Harlean Harlow Carpenter on March 3, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri. Her parents were Mont Clair Carpenter, a successful dentist from a working-class background, and his wife, Jean Poe (née Harlow), the daughter of a wealthy real estate broker. Nicknamed «Baby,» Harlean was afflicted by poor health throughout her childhood, contracting meningitis at age five and suffering from scarlet fever when she was 15. In September 1922, Jean divorced her husband and moved with her 11-year-old daughter to Hollywood, with hopes of pursuing a career as an actress. While in Los Angeles, Harlean attended the Hollywood School for Girls and met future movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joel McCrea, as well as Louis B. Mayer's daughter, Irene. In 1925, unable to find a single acting job, Jean returned in defeat to Kansas City with her daughter.   Portraits of Jean Harl...