Actress of the Month: Jean Harlow

For the month of May, the beautiful, sexy and bold, Jean Harlow. Need I say more.

The “Blonde Bombshell”, Jean Harlow’s persona eludes sex, sex and more sex. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1911, Jeans film career began by accident when she was dropping her friend, aspiring actress, Rosalie Roy, at Fox Studios for an appointment and was approached by a film executive for a screen test. Originally hesitant, Jean, coaxed my her star-stuck mother and friend and signed a contract. Her first film success was in the big-budget Howard Hughes Precode film Hells Angles (1930). Her performance was critically unclaimed but her beauty and sex-appeal made her a world-wide audience favourite. She followed it with a number of supporting roles as ‘the gangsters girl’ in The Public Enemy (1931) and The Secret Six (1931). Her most memorable roles came later under MGM in Red-Headed Women (1932) and Red Dust (1932). As the wisecracking brash prostitute, Vantine, Jean steals the spotlight and later Clark Gable in a tropical plantation in Indochina. A free spirit whose dislike for undergarments was well known, Jean had a reputation for using ice cubes before a scene to give herself the characteristic peeked breast. In 1937 at age 26, Jean Harlow died suddenly of kidney failure ending a life that was both blissful and tragic but mostly iconic.

           

            Cool Jean Quote:  As Vantine in Red Dust (1932)  

           

Vantine: You can check the wings and halo at the desk.
Dennis Morgan (Clark Gable): I'll be right up.