Clara Bow
The It Girl. Made the jump to sound in 1929 and left the business anyway.
Clara Bow rose to stardom during the silent era of the 1920s and, unlike many of her contemporaries, made the transition to talkies successfully in 1929. Her performance as a shopgirl in the 1927 film It gave her global fame and the nickname that outlived the film.
She embodied the flapper for a mass audience at the exact moment the type was being invented, which is a large part of why her publicity photographs are still in circulation.
She left films in the early 1930s. The reasons were personal and were made public in ways that would now be treated very differently.
She worked fast and by instinct and directors let her, which is visible on screen. Her fan mail in January 1929 was counted at more than 45,000 letters, more than any other Paramount player received. The studio had signed her in 1926 at $1,700 a week rising to $4,000 by 1931, and got its money back many times over: Mantrap, It and Wings all came out in 1926 and 1927, and Wings won the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Of her 58 films, 33 survive complete, 14 in part and 11 not at all, which for a 1920s star is a good ratio.
She married the actor Rex Bell in Las Vegas in December 1931 and moved to his cattle ranch in the Nevada desert, near Searchlight. Two sons were born, in 1934 and 1938. Bell went into Nevada politics and served as lieutenant governor. She made two films for Fox after the marriage, Call Her Savage in 1932 and Hoop-La in 1933, and then stopped for good. In 1949 she was treated at the Institute of Living in Connecticut, where the diagnosis given was schizophrenia; she rejected it and left. She lived alone in a bungalow in Culver City from the 1950s and died there on September 27, 1965.
Facts on this file are checked against the Wikipedia article Clara Bow. The wording is ours. Nothing about the photograph is asserted beyond the credit the file itself carries, and that credit is usually a studio rather than a person: stills departments were staff jobs and the photographer's name went unrecorded. Confident attributions in the trade are mostly inherited guesses.
Other prints under this name
About Clara Bow
How did Clara Bow die
A heart attack on September 27, 1965, at her home in Culver City, California; she was sixty. The autopsy showed atherosclerosis, and she had been in poor health for years. She had lived apart from her family, under the care of a nurse, since the early 1950s, and Rex Bell had died in 1962. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. There was no scandal attached to the death itself, which for Bow was a novelty.
Did Clara Bow really sleep with the USC football team
There is no evidence for it. The story comes from Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, first published in France in 1959 and repeatedly shown to be unreliable on other points. What is documented is that Bow entertained USC players at her house in 1927 and that the university's coach put a stop to it. The 1931 Coast Reporter tabloid printed allegations about her sex life and drinking; its publisher then tried to blackmail her for $25,000 and went to federal prison for eight years.
Why did Clara Bow quit acting
The public reason was health and the private reason was the same. In April 1931, after the Daisy DeVoe trial had put her finances and private life in the papers for weeks, she was admitted to a sanatorium and asked Paramount to release her from her last contracted picture, City Streets. DeVoe, her former secretary, was convicted on one count of grand theft and given eighteen months. Bow hated the microphone, called talkies stiff and limiting, and had a husband with a ranch. Hoop-La in 1933 was the last.
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