When you think of the ultimate blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe might come to mind. But long before Norma Jean Baker became a 1950s screen siren, another actress defined the concept of the Hollywood platinum blonde: Jean Harlow. In fact, Marilyn Monroe grew up watching the 1930s star, even modeling herself in the icon's image. Sadly, Marilyn did follow in her favorite actress's footsteps, and not just in terms of fame: The two starlets' untimely and controversial deaths were as similar as their successes in life. Now, 80 years after her death, a look back at Jean Harlow's tragic story—and the eerily parallel lives of the two Hollywood legends.

Before Jean

Just as Marilyn Monroe used to be Norma Jean, Jean Harlow was born Harlean Carpenter on March 3, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri. Harlean's mother's name was actually Jean Harlow, but after her daughter took on the screen name, she began going by "Mother Jean". (Similarly, Norma Jean would borrow her mother's maiden name of Monroe.) Meanwhile Harlean's lifelong nickname among friends and family was "The Baby."

Harlean Carpenter, ages 3, 4, and 12. Bettmann/Getty Images

When Harlean was a child, Mother Jean aspired to be an actress. She divorced Harlean's father, a dentist, and moved herself and Harlean to Hollywood to pursue her dreams, but she never found success. So, mother and daughter moved back to the Midwest, where Mother Jean married a man named Marino Bello. At age 15, Harlean caught scarlet fever, an illness that may have contributed to her eventual death.

Actress Jean Harlow and Mother Jean Bettmann/Getty Images

But, according to an episode of You Must Remember This, a podcast by Karina Longworth, Harlean was soon healthy enough to marry the first of her three husbands. Harlean was 16 when she married 20-year-old Charles McGrew—the same ages as Norma Jean and her first of three husbands, James Dougherty. The next year, Charles inherited a small fortune and moved with his new bride to Beverly Hills, where the couple carried on a reportedly rather raucous party lifestyle.

The Making of a Movie Star

Harlean was discovered by Fox executives while she was visiting a movie lot with a friend. Apparently, she wasn't all that interested in becoming a star, even giving them a fake name: her mom's. But certainly, they were interested in her—or at least, in her look: a glamorous blonde with killer curves.

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At the insistence of Mother Jean, the newly dubbed Jean Harlow began auditioning and appearing in and even left her husband when he expressed opposition to the idea of her acting.

Though she had just a small part in the 1929 film The Saturday Night Kid, Jean all but stole the show from the lead, Clara Bow, the "It Girl" starlet of the time. Her big break was in Howard Hughes's (1930), in which she replaced the original lead, silent film star Greta Nissen, who spoke with a thick Norwegian accent and therefore couldn't, in the director's mind, transition to the "talkies".

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Hughes's publicity director is credited for coining the moniker "Platinum Blonde", says The Atlantic (just as Mary Pickford was designated "America's Sweetheart"). So successful was the nickname that a 1931 Frank Capra film was renamed Platinum Blonde especially for the white-haired Jean, even though she was the supporting actress and not the film's leading lady.

Of course, the hue wasn't natural: Jean's hairstylist dyed it weekly with an incredibly harsh and dangerous combination of peroxide, ammonia, Clorox, and Lux flakes. Still, the look inspired thousands of women to purchase peroxide and attempt (often unsuccessfully) to re-create it themselves—including, eventually, the future Marilyn Monroe, who even hired Harlow's same stylist to color her hair.

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A string of hit movies followed, including (1933), (1933), (1935), and (1936). In several films, Jean starred opposite heartthrob Clark Gable, most notably in 1932's .

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust Bettmann/Getty Images

While another beautiful blonde actress, Thelma Todd, had already paved the way for the bubbly curvaceous blonde persona, Jean took it in a new direction. In the span of only a few years, the actress established herself as a smoldering sex symbol while simultaneously displaying a serious skill for quick comedic dialogue. Yet, she was given mainly "dumb blonde" parts and was considered by some to be the same in real life (perhaps one of the most obvious parallels to Marilyn Monroe).

More Tragedy Than Comedy

Jean's personal life was less stable than her work life. In 1932 Jean married MGM executive Paul Bern. Only two months after their wedding, Paul was found dead from a gun shot wound to the head in their home; Jean had been staying with her mother at the time. Despite rumors that he was murdered at the hands of a former lover (it turned out Paul was still common-law married to another woman) and an alleged MGM cover-up, Paul's death was ultimately ruled a suicide.

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Found in the home was what some believe to have been a suicide note. It read, "Dearest Dear, Unfortuately [sic] this is the only way to make good the frightful wrong I have done you and to wipe out my abject humiliation, I Love you. Paul" And then postscript: "You understand that last night was only a comedy". Jean insisted she didn't know what the note was about.

After Paul's death, Jean still struggled to find happiness. She began dating a separated but still married boxer, Max Baer. But when Max's wife filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery and named Jean as co-respondent, the studio, hoping to avoid another scandal, arranged for Jean to marry cinematographer Harold Rosson. Around this same time, Jean became ill and had to have an emergency appendectomy. The union lasted only eight months.

Jean Harlow and William Powell, 1935 Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

But by 1935, Jean seemed to have finally found love with actor William Powell, her costar in Reckless and . The two dated seriously for two years.

A Falling Star

However happy she may have been personally with William, Jean continued to drink heavily, which as Longworth notes, "may have obscured other health problems," including headaches mistaken for hangovers and a puffy face and swollen belly that Jean likely believed to be alcohol-related weight gain (her mother's solution was apparently to put her on a strict diet). Not even ten years into her career, Jean was looking less and less like her blonde bombshell self. Even her signature platinum locks began to fall out in clumps as the weekly bleachings finally took their toll.

Then, during an operation to remove all four of her wisdom teeth, Jean's heart momentarily stopped beating. Two months later, while working on another movie with Clark Gable called , her mouth was still infected from the surgery. Stomach pain and vomiting believed to be the flu kept Jean home in bed and was later misdiagnosed and treated as a swollen gallbladder.

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Clark was reportedly very concerned after he came to visit and found a terribly bloated, rotten-smelling Jean. Finally, another doctor correctly diagnosed her kidney disease, which was linked to her scarlet fever as a child and had likely been a long time coming. Sadly, at the time, there wasn't much that could be done. (The first successful kidney dialysis was not until 1945, and the first successful kidney transplant in 1954.) Jean Harlow died two days after the diagnosis, on June 7, 1937, at the age of 26.

However, alternative theories circulated about Jean's untimely death, just as they would in 1962, when a 36-year-old Marilyn Monroe unexpectedly died. Finding the truth difficult to accept, some fans speculated that Jean really died of a botched abortion, or of intestinal damage from being beaten, or from the very bleach that gave her hair its platinum blonde shade. The film Saratoga had to be completed using Jean's body-double, an experience Clark tragically compared to acting "in the arms of a ghost."

The 26-year-old's body was placed in a "massive, burnished copper casket said to have cost $5,000," The Chicago Daily Tribune reported eighty years ago. That year, Norma Jean would have been 11 years old, living in the Los Angeles Orphans Home in Hollywood and perhaps only beginning to dream of stardom. In the very last weeks of Marilyn Monroe's life, she was planning to star in a biopic about her childhood idol, Jean Harlow. Sadly, she never got the chance.