John Gilbert

Overview

Born
July 10, 1897 · Logan, Utah, USA
Died
January 9, 1936 · Los Angeles, California, USA (heart failure)
Birth name
John Cecil Pringle
Nickname
- Jack
Height
5′ 11″ (1.80 m)

Biography

Family

Spouses
Children
Parents
Relatives

Trivia

Was left standing at the altar in 1927, after Greta Garbo got cold feet about marrying him.
Almost immediately upon hearing of John Gilbert's status as an all-but-forgotten matinee idol now drinking himself to death, new-to-Hollywood screen siren Marlene Dietrich devoted herself to the project of "rehabilitating" Gilbert. When she failed to save his life and he succumbed to a heart attack a few years later, Dietrich became a lifelong "guardian angel" to Gilbert's young daughter, always remembering the child on her birthday and Christmas every year until Dietrich died.
Although she famously jilted him at the altar, Greta Garbo still cared enough about Gilbert to insist that he, and not the studio's choice of Laurence Olivier, be cast as her co-star in 1933's Queen Christina. A gallant gesture meant to revive Gilbert's fading career, it proved too little too late, and Gilbert's appeal continued to flounder. Within three years, Gilbert would die, an almost forgotten has-been.
He was played by his grandson John Fountain in Sunset (1988).
Gilbert famously did not get along with Louis B. Mayer, the two men often engaged in loud arguments. There are rumors that Mayer himself, and/or his chief sound engineer, manipulated the knobs of Gilbert's first talking films so that a perfectly adequate speaking voice came out on the big screen as ridiculously high pitched. However, this is shown to be false as Gilbert's voice in his early talkies is quite serviceable. Rather, Gilbert had difficulty with the corny dialogue he was forced to recite. While his early talkies made profits, the box office returns of his films began to decline steeply. This proved to be the beginning of the end for the decade's highest paid matinée idol ($250,000 per film).