Short answers, pulled from the story.
Irving Thalberg was born on the 30th of May 1899 in Brooklyn, New York, to German Jewish immigrant parents William and Henrietta Thalberg. He was diagnosed with blue baby syndrome shortly after birth, a congenital disease that limited the oxygen supply to his heart.
Irving Thalberg died on the 14th of September 1936, at the age of thirty-seven, due to the heart condition that had plagued him since birth. He passed away just weeks after returning from a Labor Day weekend vacation in Monterey, California.
At the age of twenty, Irving Thalberg fired the famous director Erich von Stroheim over a budget dispute while working at Universal Studios. He removed the cameras from von Stroheim's studio and edited the film Foolish Wives from five-and-a-half hours to three hours, marking the first time a director had been fired by a producer.
In 1925, at the age of twenty-four, Irving Thalberg became the vice president in charge of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He partnered with Louis B. Mayer to create one of the most profitable studios in the world and introduced innovations such as story conferences and extensive reshooting of scenes.
American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing The Last Tycoon in 1939 as a fictionalized biography of Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald named the protagonist Monroe Stahr to represent Thalberg and believed that Thalberg represented the best of Hollywood.