Jean Harlow

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article's lead section may be too long. Please read the length guidelines and help move details into the article's body. (January 2025) This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (January 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Jean Harlow
Harlow, 1930s
Born	Harlean Harlow Carpenter (1911-03-03)March 3, 1911 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.
Died	June 7, 1937(1937-06-07) (aged 26) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1928–1937
Political party	Democratic
Spouses	Charles McGrew ​ ​ (m. 1927; div. 1929)​ Paul Bern ​ ​ (m. 1932; died 1932)​ Harold Rosson ​ ​ (m. 1933; div. 1934)​
Partner	William Powell (1934–1937)
Signature

Jean Harlow (born Harlean Harlow Carpenter; March 3, 1911 – June 7, 1937) was an American actress. Spotted, so goes a believable story, by a casting director named Ryan in a parking lot at Fox Studios in February of 1928 - still a few days before she turned 17 - Harlean attracted attention with her spectacular natural beauty, petite frame, green eyes, and natural ash blonde hair. Repeatedly insisting she had no interest in acting in the movies, she finally accepted a letter of recommendation to Central Casting. She took the letter home and dropped it in a drawer and was only, finally, goaded into signing up for work as an extra by her social friends and her mother.

So convincing was she at playing disreputable tramps or gold diggers on film, she was personally named in 1934 as one of two particularly conspicuous examples of amoral and irresponsible movie making by the newly formed Catholic Legion of Decency. The other was the outrageously raunchy Mae West. The two actresses in real life could not have been more different.

Quickly blooming into a smooth, natural, full spectrum actress, she played strong and virtuous women in ten of her last thirteen pictures.

Harlow was in the film industry for only nine years, but she became one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars, whose image in the public eye has endured. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Harlow number 22 on its greatest female screen legends list.^[1]