Ava Gardner
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922 in Grabtown, North Carolina. She was the youngest of six children of Mary Elizabeth and Jonas Gardner, an impoverished cotton and tobacco farmer. Gardner’s father lost his farm when she was two, and the family moved to Newport News, Virginia, where he worked in a sawmill and her mother ran a boarding house. At age 18 went to New York City, where she took a screen test. Her extraordinary beauty won her a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. In Hollywood she received acting and diction lessons while playing bit roles in a score of minor motion pictures in the 1940s. Her first important role was opposite Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946), and she went on to starring roles in such films as The Hucksters (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). Her husky voice and seductive personal presence had made her one of the best-known American actresses by the early 1950s.
Ava with Gregory Peck in "The Great Sinner".
But Gardner was not content to be typecast as a "sex symbol," and her sensitive characterizations in such pictures as Mogambo (1953), Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1964) received critical praise. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1953 for her performance opposite Clark Gable in Mogambo. Gardner left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1958 and became an independent actress. She continued to appear in films through the 1960s and '70s, though usually in less-important roles than before. Gardner's typical screen persona was that of an earthy, free-spirited, and irreverent woman of the world. In 1968, Ava moved to London, where she would live for the rest of her life. Ava had suffered a couple of strokes which did slow her down somewhat but not for her zest for life. She continued to work on her autobiography entitled Ava, My Story, which was concluded before she died in London, on January 25, 1990 of pneumonia at the age of 67. She never got to see the book in final print. Ava was laid to rest in Smithfield, North Carolina in the Gardner family plot. An Ava Gardner Museum is located there. She was married three times, to the actor Mickey Rooney, the bandleader Artie Shaw, and the singer Frank Sinatra.
Biography courtesy: Lenin Imports.
Ava with Mickey Rooney.
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