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On the record
Born in Fort Wayne; the defining screwball comedienne of 1930s Hollywood (My Man Godfrey, 1936), among the highest-paid stars in America, about $500,000 a year at her peak, before her death in a 1942 plane crash returning from a war-bond tour.
She was born Jane Alice Peters on 6 October 1908 at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne, the third child of Frederic Christian Peters and Elizabeth Knight Peters. Her paternal grandfather, John Clouse Peters, co-founded the Horton Washing Machine Co. of Fort Wayne, and spent her first six years in the city before her mother took the children to Los Angeles. During the Great Flood of 1913 the family had housed flood victims at the Rockhill Street house — the episode credited as the start of her lifelong philanthropy (Indiana Historical Bureau). Under the name Carole Lombard she became the defining actress of screwball comedy — Twentieth Century (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), which brought her an Academy Award nomination, and Nothing Sacred (1937) — and for a time the highest-paid star in Hollywood. She married Clark Gable in 1939.
In January 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, Lombard came home to Indiana for a war-bond rally in Indianapolis and raised more than two million dollars in a single evening, 15 January. Flying back to California the next day with her mother and her press agent, she died when TWA Flight 3 crashed into Mount Potosí, Nevada, on 16 January 1942; all twenty-two people aboard were killed. She was thirty-three. Her last film, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, was released after her death.
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- § 06 — people of the record
From § 06, People of the record, and the sources cited there; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Carole Lombard"; Wikipedia, "Carole Lombard."