Ava Gardner Bio
Ava Gardner Bio
Mickey Rooney (m. 1942-1943)
Artie Shaw (m. 1945-1946)
Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922 - January 25, 1990) was an American actress.
She was signed to a contract by MGM Studios in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew attention with her performance in The Killers (1946). She became one of Hollywood's leading actresses, considered one of the most beautiful women of her day. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Mogambo (1953).
She appeared in several high-profile films from the 1950s to 1970s, including The Hucksters (1947), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959), Seven Days in May (1964), The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Earthquake (1974), and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). Gardner continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death from pneumonia, at age 67, in 1990.
She is listed 25th among the American Film Institute's Greatest female stars.
Ava Gardner: Early years
Gardner was born in the big farming community of Grabtown, Johnston County, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children (she had two brothers, Raymond and Melvin, and four sisters, Beatrice, Elsie Mae, Inez, and Myra) of poor cotton and tobacco farmers. Her mother, Mary Elizabeth ("Mollie") Gardner (née Baker), was a Baptist of Scots-Irish and English descent; her father, Jonas Bailey Gardner, a Roman Catholic of Irish and American Indian (Tuscarora) descent. While the children still were young, the Gardners lost their property, forcing Jonas Gardner to work at a sawmill and Mollie to begin working as a cook and housekeeper at a dormitory for teachers at the nearby Brogden School.
When Gardner was seven years old, the family decided to try their luck in a larger city, Newport News, Virginia, where Mollie Gardner found work managing a boardinghouse for the city's many shipworkers. While in Newport News, Gardner's father became ill and died from bronchitis in 1938, when Ava was 15 years old. After Jonas Gardner's death, the family moved to Rock Ridge near Wilson, North Carolina, where Mollie Gardner ran another boarding house for teachers. Ava Gardner attended high school in Rock Ridge and she graduated from there in 1939. She then attended secretarial classes at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson for about a year.
Ava Gardner: Early career
in My Forbidden Past (1951)Gardner was visiting her sister Beatrice ("Bappie") in New York in 1941 when Beatrice's husband Larry Tarr, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait. He was so pleased with the results that he displayed the finished product in the front window of his Tarr Photography Studio on 25th Avenue. A Loews Theatres legal clerk, Barnard "Barney" Duhan, spotted Gardner's photo in Tarr's studio. At the time, Duhan often posed as an MGM talent scout to meet girls, using the fact that MGM was a subsidiary of Loews. Duhan entered Tarr's and tried to get Gardner's number, but was rebuffed by the receptionist. Duhan made the offhand comment, "Somebody should send her info to MGM", and the Tarrs did so immediately. Shortly after, Gardner, who at the time was a student at Atlantic Christian College, traveled to New York to be interviewed at MGM's New York office by Al Altman, head of MGM's New York talent department. With cameras rolling, he directed the eighteen-year-old to walk toward the camera, turn and walk away, then rearrange some flowers in a vase. He did not attempt to record her voice because her Southern accent made it almost impossible for him to understand her. Though Al thought Ava the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, he believed the test was a disaster and was completely surprised by what he saw in the screening room. On screen she was magnetic. The camera loved her. He sent the test to Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer, head of the studio, sent a telegram to Al: "She can't sing, she can't act, she can't talk, She's terrific!" She was offered a standard contract by MGM, and left school for Hollywood in 1941 with her sister Bappie accompanying her. MGM's first order of business was to provide her a speech coach, as her Carolina drawl was nearly incomprehensible to them.
Ava Gardner: Career
Gardner came to prominence in the Mark Hellinger-produced smash hit film noir The Killers (1946), which introduced Burt Lancaster to the screen in the lead role.
With Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946) The Killers (1946)Other films include The Hucksters (1947) with Clark Gable, Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) with Gregory Peck, Lone Star (1952) with Clark Gable, Mogambo (1953) with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly, 1954's The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart (which some consider to be Gardner's "signature film" since it mirrored her real life custom of going barefoot), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Sun Also Rises with Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn (in which she played party-girl Brett Ashley) (1957), and the film version of Nevil Shute's best-selling On the Beach with Peck and Fred Astaire. Off-camera, she could be witty and pithy, as in her assessment of director John Ford, who directed Mogambo ("The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!")
As torch singer-on-the-make Jean Ogilvie in 1947's The Hucksters, doing some selling of her own to radio ad-man Clark GableGardner again appeared with Lancaster, this time paired with Kirk Douglas, in Seven Days in May (1962), a taut thriller about a military takeover of the US government. She found herself billed between Charlton Heston and David Niven in the epic 55 Days at Peking in 1963, a lavish version of the Chinese revolt against foreign control during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
The following year, she played her last great leading role in a superlative film, The Night of the Iguana (1964), based upon a Tennessee Williams play and starring Richard Burton as an atheist clergyman and Deborah Kerr as a gentle artist traveling with her aged poet grandfather. John Huston directed the movie in the seaside jungles of Mexico, insisting on making the film in black and white, a decision he later regretted because of the vivid colors of the flora. Gardner received billing below Burton but above Deborah Kerr. Gardner was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award for her hearty performance in this signature role.
Two years later, in 1966, Gardner briefly sought the role of Mrs. Robinson in Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). She reportedly called Nichols and said, "I want to see you! I want to talk about this Graduate thing!" Nichols never seriously considered her for the part, preferring to cast a younger woman (Anne Bancroft was 36 while Gardner was 45), but he did visit her hotel, where he later recounted that "she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché. She said, 'All right, let's talk about your movie. First of all, I strip for nobody.'"
Gardner moved to London, England in 1968, undergoing an elective hysterectomy to allay her worries of contracting the uterine cancer that had claimed the life of her own mother. That year, she made what some consider to be one of her best films, Mayerling, in which she played the supporting role of Austrian Empress Elisabeth of Austria opposite James Mason as Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Mogambo (1953)She appeared in a number of disaster films throughout the 1970s, notably Earthquake (1974) with Charlton Heston, The Cassandra Crossing (1976), and the Canadian movie City on Fire (1979). She also appeared briefly as Lillie Langtry at the end of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) with Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset, and in The Blue Bird (1976) with Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda.
Her last movie was Regina Roma (1982), a direct-to-video release. In the 1980s she acted primarily on television, including the miniseries remake of The Long Hot Summer (1985) and the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing, also in 1985. In 1986 she appeared in her two final projects, the TV movies Harem and Maggie.
Ava Gardner: Marriages and relationships
Ava Gardner - Mickey Rooney
Soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, Gardner met fellow MGM contract player Mickey Rooney; they married on January 10, 1942, in Ballard, California; she was 19 years old and he was 21. They divorced in 1943. He reputedly rhapsodized about their sex life later, but Gardner said, "He may have enjoyed the sex, but [goodness knows] I didn't." She once characterized their marriage as "Love Finds Andy Hardy".
Ava Gardner - Howard Hughes
Gardner became a friend of businessman and aviator Howard Hughes in the early to mid-1940s and the relationship lasted into the 1950s. Ava stated in her autobiography Ava: My Story, that she was never in love with Howard Hughes, but he was in and out of her life for about twenty years. Howard's trust in Ava was what kept their relationship alive. She describes him as "painfully shy, completely enigmatic and more eccentric...than anyone [she] had ever met."
Ava Gardner - Artie Shaw
Gardner's second marriage was brief and to jazz musician and band leader Artie Shaw, from 1945 to 1946.
Ava Gardner - Frank Sinatra
Sinatra, whose career had seriously slumped, accompanied his wife Gardner to Africa during filming for Mogambo (1953)Gardner's third and last marriage (1951-1957) was to singer and actor Frank Sinatra. She would later say in her autobiography that he was the love of her life. Sinatra left his wife, Nancy, for Ava and their subsequent marriage made headlines. Sinatra was savaged by gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the Hollywood establishment, the Roman Catholic Church and by his fans for leaving his wife for a noted femme fatale. Gardner used her considerable influence, particularly with Harry Cohn's wife, to get Sinatra cast in his Oscar-winning role in From Here to Eternity (1953). That role and the award revitalized both Sinatra's acting and singing careers.
The Gardner-Sinatra marriage was tumultuous. Gardner confided to Artie Shaw, her second husband, that "With him [Frank] it's impossible!it's like being with a woman. He's so gentle. It's as though he thinks I'll break, as though I'm a piece of Dresden china and he's gonna hurt me." During their marriage Gardner became pregnant twice, but she had two abortions. "MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies," she said. She said years later, "We couldn't even take care of ourselves. How were we going to take care of a baby?" Gardner and Sinatra remained good friends for the rest of her life.
Ava Gardner - Luis Miguel Dominguín
Gardner divorced Sinatra in 1957 and headed to Spain where she began a friendship with writer Ernest Hemingway. While staying with Hemingway at his villa in San Francisco de Paula in Havana, Cuba, Gardner once swam alone with no bathing suit in his pool. After watching her, Hemingway ordered his staff: "The water is not to be emptied". Gardner's friendship with Hemingway led to her becoming a fan of bullfighting and bullfighters such as Luis Miguel Dominguín, who became her lover. "It was a sort of madness, honey," she said later of the time.
Ava Gardner: Final years and death
After a lifetime of smoking, Gardner suffered from emphysema, a terminal disease, in addition to an auto-immune disorder (which may have been lupus). Two strokes in 1986 left her partially paralyzed and bedridden. Although Gardner could afford her medical expenses, Sinatra wanted to pay for her to visit a specialist in the United States, and she allowed him to make the arrangements for a medically-staffed private plane. Her last words (to her housekeeper Carmen), were reportedly, "I'm so tired," before she died of pneumonia at the age of 67. After her death, Sinatra's daughter, Tina, found him slumped in his room, crying, and unable to speak.
Gardner was not only the love of his life, but also was the inspiration for one of his most personal songs, "I'm a Fool to Want You", which Sinatra (who received a co-writing credit for the song) recorded twice, toward the end of his contract with Columbia Records and during his years on Capitol Records. ("It was Ava who taught him how to sing a torch song", Sinatra arranger Nelson Riddle was once quoted as saying.) Because of the presence of a black limousine parked behind the crowd of 500 mourners, it was reported that Sinatra attended her funeral; it turned out to be a hairstylist from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who felt that a limousine was the only appropriate mode of transportation to Gardner's funeral. A floral arrangement at Gardner's graveside simply read: "With My Love, Francis".
Gardner was buried in the Sunset Memorial Park, Smithfield, North Carolina, next to her brothers and their parents, Jonah (1878-1938) and Mollie Gardner (1883-1943). The town of Smithfield now has an Ava Gardner Museum.
Ava Gardner: Award Nominations
Gardner was nominated for an Academy Award for Mogambo (1953); the award was won by Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday. Her performance as Maxine Faulk in The Night of the Iguana (1964), was well reviewed, and she was nominated a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe.
Ava Gardner: Film portrayals
Gardner has been portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden in the TV miniseries Sinatra, Deborah Kara Unger in HBO's The Rat Pack, Kate Beckinsale in the 2004 Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator and Anna Drijver in the 2012 Italian TV film Walter Chiari - Fino all'ultima risata.
