Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow was an American film actress and pre-Code Hollywood sex symbol whose roles in Hell's Angels, Red Dust, Dinner at Eight, and Bombshell made her the top female box-office draw of the early 1930s. She was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter on March 3, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of dentist Mont Clair Carpenter and the former Jean Poe Harlow.

She attended the Ferry Hall School in Lake Forest, Illinois, then eloped at sixteen with businessman Charles McGrew and moved to Los Angeles, where she began working as a film extra in 1928 using her mother's maiden name as her stage name.

Howard Hughes signed her for the 1930 World War I aviation epic Hell's Angels, and her platinum-blonde hair quickly drew imitators across the country. MGM bought her contract in 1932 and paired her with Clark Gable in Red Dust, the first of six films they made together.

She married producer Paul Bern in 1932; he died by gunshot two months later. A third marriage to cinematographer Harold Rosson ended in 1935, and she became engaged to actor William Powell. While filming Saratoga with Gable, she developed kidney failure and died on June 7, 1937, in Los Angeles at age 26.

Their name Jean derives from the Old French form of the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "God is gracious," and entered Scotland as a feminine form of John. Jean was a top-twenty girls' name in the United States from the 1910s through the 1940s.