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Clara Bow was born on Brooklyn, New York on July 29, 1905. She was raised in a Brooklyn tenement by a mentally ill mother and an abusive father. She was never registered at the Civil Registry as her mother thought they would both die in the heat wave the same year Clara was born. Clara’s childhood was largely unhappy, being in a dysfunctional family stricken with poverty and abused physically and emotionally. It was also reported her father raped her when she was 15 to 16 years old. To escape these awful circumstances, Clara focused all her attention to the films and movies.

She worked in Coney Island after she dropped out of school at the age of seven. Luckily, the movies found Clara Bow and she became a movie actress in her mid-teens. Clara's screen introduction was with the silent film called Down to the Sea in Ships. This young and ambitious actress used her unfortunate circumstances in life to motivate her in drama roles.

In 1921, Clara Bow won the Motion Picture Magazine’s Fame and Fortune contest, which grand prize is a role in the film itself. Clara also won a part in the movie Beyond the Rainbow in 1922, but she was only humiliated and disappointed to learn that her scenes were cut from the final print. Her fans would not have seen this part had it not been restored years later. She made 25 films during her time and came to be known as the original "it girl." She's the symbol of the flapper age and sphere headed the bobbed hair look among women across America.

An officer of Preferred Pictures approached the rising Clara Bow in the East Cost and offered her free train fair to Hollywood to see B.P. Schulberg, head of Preferred Pictures. Mr. Schulberg was not charmed when he first saw Clara with her ragged clothes. Reluctant at first, he agreed to try her anyway and was very happy that he did.

Clara Bow would have been cast in a series of small roles thereafter, starting from Maytime in 1923. Some of her successful films after Maytime were The Plastic Age (1925) and Mantrap (1926).
She married cowboy actor Rex Bell in 1932 and had two sons with him. Later in 1949, Clara Bow would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In one of the top mental institutions of the country where her husband sent her with good intentions, Clara's Doctors found that she was being rape by her father at a young age. Clara Bow died an insomniac in 1965 and her body was laid in the Forrest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.