Harlean Harlow Carpenter (March 3, 1911 - June 7, 1937) was an American actress. Known for her portrayal of "bad girl" characters. Often nicknamed the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde", Jean was popular for her "Laughing Vamp" screen persona. She 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 of classical Hollywood cinema list.
Jean was born in Kansas City, but moved to Hollywood with her mother at the age of 12 in hopes of becoming an actress. Although she was told that she was too old to begin a film career, her mother enrolled her at the Hollywood School for Girls, where she met Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joel McCrea, and Irene Mayer Selznick. With their finances dwindling, Jean and her mother moved back to Kansas City was sent to summer camp at Camp Cha-Ton-Ka, in Michigan, where she became ill with scarlet fever.
During Jean’s freshman year at the school, she was paired with a "big sister" from the senior class who introduced her to 19-year-old Charles "Chuck" Fremont McGrew III, an heir to a large fortune. By the fall of 1926, Jean and Chuck were dating seriously, and they were married in 1927. The couple left Chicago and moved to Los Angeles, settling into a home in Beverly Hills, where Jean thrived as a wealthy socialite.
While living in Los Angeles, Jean befriended a young aspiring actress named Rosalie Roy. Not owning a car herself, Rosalie asked Jean to drive her to Fox Studios for an appointment. While waiting for Rosalie, she was noticed and approached by Fox executives, whom she told she was not interested. Nevertheless, she was given letters of introduction to Central Casting. A few days later, Rosalie Roy bet Jean that she did not have the nerve to go in for an audition. Unwilling to lose a wager and pressed by her enthusiastic mother who had followed her daughter to Los Angeles by this time, Jean went to Central Casting. She appeared in her first film, Honor Bound, and was first signed by business magnate Howard Hughes, who directed her first major role in Hell's Angels (1930). After a series of critically failed films, and Hughes' loss of interest in her career, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought out Jean's contract in 1932 and cast her in leading roles in a string of hits built on her comedic talent: Red-Headed Woman (1932), Red Dust (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Reckless (1935) and Suzy (1936).
In May 1937, while filming Saratoga, Jean began to complain of illness. A month later, she was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, where she slipped into a coma, and died in the hospital at the age of 26. In the doctor's press releases, the cause of death was given as cerebral edema, a complication of kidney failure. MGM completed the film Saratoga with the use of body doubles and released it less than two months after her death; it became MGM's most successful film of 1937, as well as the highest-grossing film of her career.
Jean's popularity rivaled and then surpassed that of MGM's top leading ladies Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. She was the leading sex symbol of the early 1930s and one of the defining figures of the pre-Code era of American cinema.