Considering that Jean Harlow died at age 26, her impact on cinema was enormous. And honestly, I can kinda see why:
She absolutely oozed sex appeal — for the time, as much or more than Marilyn Monroe did some twenty years later — and certainly never posed nude, either. It is said, with some justification, that she never wore underwear of any kind. Jimmy Stewart later claimed that she kissed so beautifully that when doing a kissing scene with her, he deliberately flubbed the action so that they had to do several takes. And as for Clark Gable… they did several movies together, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing much acting, either.
Talk about setting the screen on fire…
She and William Powell were both from Kansas City and were raised a good deal less than half a mile from one another, but never met until both relocated to Hollywood for their respective acting careers. She was the love of his life and he, along with former costars Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable, were devastated by her death from renal failure in 1937.