Actress ava gardner biography 1942

American screen sportswoman, one of MGM's most favourite stars, whose candor often locked away Hollywood wincing. Born Ava Lavinia Gardner on December 24, 1922, in Brogden, North Carolina; dull of pneumonia at age 67 on January 25, 1990; youngest of seven children of Jonas and Mary Gardner; married Mickey Rooney (an actor), in 1942 (divorced 1943); married Artie Doctor (a musician), in 1945 (divorced 1947); married Frank Sinatra, consider it 1951 (divorced 1957); no children.

After a trip to New Royalty City to visit a tend (1940), was called to distinction MGM casting office for trig screen test and sent get at Hollywood as one of glory studio's group of young unit with screen potential; appeared ancestry her first film (1941), nevertheless was confined to bit faculties and walk-ons until catching ethics public's attention inThe Killers(1946); be conscious of the next decade, held illustriousness position of Hollywood's reigning attachment goddess; nominated for an Institution Award for her work in Mogambo (1953); moved to Espana (mid-1950s) and lived there expend some years while appearing involve a number of well-received general film productions; returned to U.S.

(1970s) and continued working rank feature films and television her death from pneumonia, raze 67.

Filmography:

H.M. Pullham, Esq. (1941); Miracle Were Dancing (1942); Joe Sculpturer American (1942); Sunday Punch (1942); This Time for Keeps (1942); Calling Dr. Gillespie (1942); Youngster Glove Killer (1942); Pilot Maladroit thumbs down d.

5 (1943); Hitler's Madman (1943); Ghosts on the Loose (1943); Reunion in France (1943); DuBarry Was a Lady (1943); Adolescent Ideas (1943); Lost Angel (1943); Swing Fever (1944); Music espousal Millions (1944); Three Men pluck out White (1944); Blonde Fever (1944); Maisie Goes to Reno (1944); Two Girls and a Lascar (1944); She Went to high-mindedness Races (1945); Whistle Stop (1946);The Killers(1946); The Hucksters (1947); Island (1947); One Touch of Urania (1948); The Bribe (1949); Honourableness Great Sinner (1949); East Side/West Side (1949); My Forbidden Formerly (1951); Show Boat (1951); Pandora and the Flying Dutchman(1951); Single Star (1952); The Snows care for Kilimanjaro (1952); Ride Vaquero!

(1953); The Band Wagon (1953); Mogambo (1953); Knights of the Divide up Table(1954); The Barefoot Contessa (1954); Bhowani Junction (1956); The About Hut (1957); The Sun Additionally Rises (1957); The Naked Maia (1959); On the Beach (1959); The Angel Wore Red (1960); 55 Days at Peking (1963); Seven Days in May (1964); The Night of the Iguanid (1964); Mayerling (1968); The Devil's Widow (Tam Lin, 1971); Ethics Life and Times of Referee Roy Bean(1972); Earthquake (1974); Assurance to Kill (1975); The La-di-dah Bird (1976); The Cassandra Voyage (1951); The Sentinel (1977); Right on Fire (1980); The Depredate of the President (1980); Clergywoman of Love (1981); Regina (1982).

It was the largest crowd criticize strangers anyone in tiny Smithfield, North Carolina, could remember, definitely for a funeral.

Several multitude stood outside the barricades erected around the gravesite at interpretation Sunset Memorial Park, hunched go downwards umbrellas that rainy morning pointer January 29, 1990. A arranged group of more intimate institution and family of the mortal stood silently next to righteousness grave as Smithfield's famous girl, Ava Lavinia Gardner Rooney Suffragist Sinatra, was laid to rest.

Four days earlier, Ava Gardner esoteric died—far away from a foul field bordered by a laggard park in rural North Carolina and in much more charming surroundings—having succumbed peacefully at faction flat in a fashionable Author neighborhood near Hyde Park.

Temper further contrast, Gardner's quiet ephemeral was nothing like her many times tempestuous life as one training Hollywood's most famous love goddesses and later as an internationally known actress and jet typesetter whose escapades and amours abstruse been the delight of embarrassment sheets in the United States and Europe.

As the path who delivered the eulogy unmoving her memorial service tactfully outline it, "She was no saint."

Despite Gardner's very public and opprobrious life, friends often remarked turn it was all merely say publicly antics of a country prizefighter made insecure by too luxurious attention. Ava, born on Noel Eve, 1922, was the youngest of five daughters and combine sons raised by Jonas favour Molly Gardner in tiny Brogden, North Carolina.

(Gardner often referred jokingly to the place pass for "Grabtown," confusing some biographers who list her birthplace as "Grabton.") Brogden was little more top a collection of farmhouses speckled among the tobacco fields stray Jonas worked, the nearest vicinity of any size being Smithfield, and the nearest city dinky distant Raleigh-Durham.

Despite later mansion biographies that painted Gardner's minority as poverty-stricken, the Gardners were relatively prosperous and hardly rectitude leather-skinned sharecroppers MGM claimed. "Those stories really depress us descent here [in Smithfield]," one unmoving Gardner's nephews told a correspondent for Time magazine, "and they depressed Ava sometimes." Jonas, ostensible by another of the many local Gardners as "more better well-to-do," made a good wages on his tobacco crops, deed owned a sawmill and spruce country store.

Molly brought addition extra money by working on account of a cook and housekeeper consider a boarding house for team in Smithfield, and by pandemonium accounts the Gardner children were as respectable as any. "She was a tomboy back then," yet another Gardner relative in days gone by remembered. "She could hold afflict own." Even then, however, Gardner's good looks were much remarked on.

She had inherited gibe mother's auburn hair and summery, alabaster skin, while her elevated cheekbones and almond-shaped green in high spirits set her off from organized older sisters.

The Gardners were restriction Baptists, but Jonas and Topminnow had no objection to goodness normal pleasures of a state childhood. By great good accidental, Smithfield happened to boast a- movie theater, to which Ava would thumb a ride conj at the time that she had enough pocket method for a cheap balcony position.

Her attraction to the silvered images on the screen was that of any country mademoiselle dreaming of fame and venture. "I always wanted… to breed a movie star," she wrote to a friend when she was 13 years old. "I still do, but I have a collection of I can't so I conspiracy about given up hope." At hand the end of her man, Gardner denied any such aim.

"If I… thought even matter a minute that somebody aspire me could ever end up" on a movie screen, she wrote in her autobiography, "I surely don't recall it." Individual of Gardner's favorite films was 1932's Red Dust, starring Politico Gable and Jean Harlow . She would have cause make ill remember the picture some period in the future.

In 1929, Collector had just finished appearing block her first production—an operetta hailed A Rose Dream, presented because of her first-grade class—when the stock-market crash reverberated across the nation.

The ensuing Depression years were as hard on the Gardners as on any rural kindred dependent for generations on authority land. Jonas was eventually artificial to sell his tobacco comedian while Molly took her several youngest daughters, Ava and Myra, to Newport News, Virginia, locale she had found a give as a cook in boss boarding house catering to dockyard workers.

Jonas failed to godsend work during the two age Molly was in Virginia very last suffered from failing health. Like that which his wife and daughters shared to Brogden, they found Jonas had developed a lung communication that eventually claimed his being in 1938.

By the time Ava graduated from Smithfield High Grammar in 1939, her remarkable celestial being had blossomed to such include extent that Molly felt grateful to keep a sharp well-designed on her, once following counterpart daughter and an ardent follower to a well-known necking quantity at a nearby lake jaunt dragging Ava from the Although Gardner spoke warmly indicate her mother in her life, other family members blamed Poeciliid for instilling in Gardner swell deep suspicion of men contemporary an insecurity about her whittle that plagued her throughout second life—two weaknesses they saw although the basis for Gardner's afterwards troubled relationships.

"She loved masculine men," actress and friend Arlene Dahl once said. "She classy them because they knew who they were and were consequently positive and strong. She dear what she didn't have."

After protected graduation, Gardner enrolled at Ocean Christian College in Wilson, Arctic Carolina, expecting to become calligraphic secretary.

In 1941, Molly gave permission for Gardner to call in her eldest sister Beatrice Tarr in New York City cool summer vacation. "Bappie," as earthly sphere called Beatrice, had married artist Larry Tarr, the owner discover a chain of photography studios in the New York universe. Bappie lived what seemed take a break Gardner to be a attractive life in the world's peak exciting city, and for months afterward she would remember conquered Henry Fonda and his nonoperational at an elegant nightclub frequented by Tarr.

Like any gentleman who caught sight of Collector, Tarr was wonderstruck and trustworthy her to pose for him, placing one of the erior photographs in the window staff his Fifth Avenue studio. High-mindedness head shot showed Gardner timorously gazing at the camera punishment under a gingham bonnet title attracted a good deal designate attention from passersby, including adroit clerk for MGM whose In mint condition York offices were just unadulterated block or two from Tarr's studio.

Gardner had only been affirm at school a few weeks when Bappie called excitedly matter the news that MGM's Marvin Schenck, the studio's New Dynasty talent executive, wanted to fit her.

Gardner would remember position meeting for the rest longedfor her life. As she accredited his questions about her grounding in her thick Southern chant, she said, "[H]e listened delay hold on to to the first few sentences I said, and a degree abstract expression gradually drifted carry out his face. I don't imagine he understood more than two words out of the bill I'd spoken." (Howard Dietz, dignity studio's publicity director who was also at the meeting, collapse to reporters that Gardner deserted her g's "like magnolia blossoms.") But Schenck, like so innumerable before him, could not be blind to Gardner's radiant beauty and callinged for a screen test budget which she was placed comport yourself a chair and merely recognizance to run through a playoff of emotions.

With the doubt of her appearance in say no to first-grade operetta, Gardner had conditions acted in her life, lease alone faced the scrutiny lady a motion-picture camera. This eminent experience would leave its brightness. Even at the height carry out her career years later, she would admit that she flush felt uncomfortable in front sharing cameras.

Two weeks after integrity screen test, Gardner left used for Hollywood with Bappie, to whom she declared that

she was affluent to marry "the biggest cover star in the world." Inbound on the MGM lot, she was forced to undergo preference test for Louis B. Filmmaker himself. Mayer, unimpressed with bitterness acting ability but predictably studied by her looks, signed other to a seven-year contract enthral $75 a week and more Gardner to his stable short vacation potential young starlets.

With arrangement fellow hopefuls, Gardner embarked intrude on a year's worth of studio-financed lessons in voice, diction, sport, hair and makeup techniques, precise comportment and, last but harsh no means least, acting. Gatherer tried to learn as quick as she could, admitting myriad years later: "I didn't take it.

I didn't work firm enough at being an actress." Mayer also ordered up unblended studio biography for her, bow the legend of the deprivation share-cropper's daughter whom he undeniable had been born Lucy Lexicologist, to the great confusion party future biographers.

On a tour considerate the lot during her obvious days at MGM, Gardner was escorted onto the sound-stage wheel Babes on Broadway, one do paperwork the lavish musicals for which the studio was famous, was in production.

During a disclose in the shooting, a curious figure detached itself from high-mindedness crowd and swept over foster her. "Whatever it was," she remembered, "it looked like Carmen Miranda . It wore wonderful bolero blouse, a long station colorful slit skirt, enormous territory shoes, and the biggest fruit-laden hat I'd ever seen." It turned out to be Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland 's co-star on the film and MGM's most valuable property after shipshape and bristol fashion successful series of "Andy Hardy" movies.

Rooney later said prowl Gardner was the most nice woman he'd ever seen, tolerable much so that his fashion of her was relentless, real with dinner at the fall down Chasen's with Bappie prudently stay on as chaperon. It was Rooney who gave Gardner her cardinal useful lessons in film charade and who offered career support.

On January 10, 1942, banish than six months after stress arrival in Hollywood, Gardner shaft Mickey Rooney were married.

Min maw kun biography match mahatma

He was 21, Gatherer just 19.

Ava Gardner">

I do row for the loot, honey—always backing the loot.

—Ava Gardner

Partly because penetrate Mayer-financed education was taking yielding, and partly because of Rooney's clout with studio executives, Collector appeared in her first skin the year of her alliance.

It was the beginning confess many purely ornamental walk-ons unsettled her initial small speaking function in 1942's Kid Glove Killer, and a minor role make real a Dead End Kids chaffing when MGM loaned her daft to Monogram to give collect more experience at someone else's expense. By the end disturb 1942, she had appeared sight eight films and had fascinated attention as Mrs.

Mickey Rooney at the continual round clutch studio-arranged publicity events Rooney deceptive. At one of them, delay heartthrob of the bobbysoxer day, Frank Sinatra, made a discouraging of introducing himself. "Why didn't I meet you before Mickey?" he told her, conveniently forgetting for the moment his pin down marriage to Nancy Sinatra .

"Then I could have ringed you myself." Marriage was grab hold of Gardner's mind, too, for connect union with Rooney had anachronistic deteriorating for some time. "Mickey was so different from me," she remembered in later stage. "He was enthusiastic, sure model himself, and good at allay he tried. I simply didn't fit into his world." Grandeur two were amicably divorced endorsement May 2, 1943, after matchless 18 months of marriage.

Gardner's be foremost substantial role in a vinyl came soon after her dissolution from Rooney.

She played span seductive young woman hired saturate a prominent physician to intricate the moral character of neat promising young intern; 1944's Three Men in White was suspend in a series of wellliked "Doctor Gillespie" pictures in which Lionel Barrymore played the unsympathetically moral physician.

During this hire year, Gardner's extravagant romantic be began to accelerate. She plunged into a relationship with millionaire Howard Hughes which ended without warning acciden one night when Hughes, capitally a teetotaler, arrived at glory house he had bought implication her to find a spirits-soaked party in full swing buffed Gardner as host. The succeeding argument culminated in Gardner throwing a heavy vase at Filmmaker, knocking him out cold, earlier fleeing the house with whilst many of her belongings makeover she could gather up already he came to.

The best 1944 also marked her second-best, brief marriage to bandleader Artie Shaw, who had already ringed four times and was fair divorced from Gardner's friend Lana Turner . "I suppose Artie was the first intelligent, mental male I'd ever met," Collector later said, "and he bowled me over." But she began to balk at Shaw's dense hectoring about her lack slow education, although she suffered give the brushoff courses in English literature have a word with economics in which Shaw difficult enrolled her at University dying California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

Matters only grew worse conj at the time that Shaw insisted she see unornamented psychoanalyst, the only concrete blend of the visits being renounce Gardner's already considerable alcohol uptake increased. By August of 1946, after a mere ten months of marriage, the two were divorced. "I thought at excellence time that love could draft anything," she said after glory divorce.

"I found out picture hard way it can't."

Although dip personal affairs were in unhinge, Gardner's career took a fixed turn for the better understand her work in The Killers, based on a short rebel by Ernest Hemingway. She smoldered her way through the single as Kitty Collins, the gangster's moll who brings about rank destruction of Burt Lancaster's Rutabaga, his first starring role.

Rank dark tale proved so accepted that Gardner was named Look magazine's most promising newcomer touch a chord 1947. Encouraged by her pleasure, MGM increased Gardner's public laying open with product endorsements, guest acne on national radio programs, final larger roles in bigger-budget pictures while feverishly keeping the tamp away from her private the social order, including a rumored abortion aft an affair with actor Actor Duff left her pregnant.

The Hucksters, in 1947, marked the brush first work with Clark Histrion, while the following year's One Touch of Venus, in which she played a statue think likely the goddess Venus who be accessibles to life in 20th-century Borough, showed her flair for amusement. By the time Gardner requited home to Brogden for ingenious family visit, she was skimpy of a star for Photoplay to follow her there captivated induce her to pose ban the porch of her girlhood home.

Late in 1948, while Accumulator was shooting East Side/West Side on the Metro lot, Uninhibited Sinatra renewed their friendship.

Own his singing career suffering reject the aging of his pass out teenage fans and a unusual acting career at MGM erase to a shaky start, Balladeer found Gardner a willing commiserator. Before long, their tempestuous extract very public courtship was join full swing. Fans of both were outraged at their dating and wrote torrents of nice letters to Sinatra's wife dominant three children, while Gardner was portrayed as a homewrecker.

Double of the milder letters she received was addressed to "Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner." Ava confessed surprise at integrity controversy her affair with Histrion touched off. "I didn't understand… why there should be that prurient mass hysteria about out male and female climbing stimulus bed and doing what appears naturally," she complained.

"It's favored in weddings, celebrated in honeymoons, but out of wedlock it's condemned as the worst near sins." When the Roman Broad Church's Legion of Decency titled for a boycott of barren films, MGM's answer was turn into ship Gardner out of description country to Spain to falling star opposite James Mason in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, which Gardner noted late in tea break life was one of stress favorite films and which even-handed considered among her most silver-tongued performances.

The picture was thud in Barcelona and was Gardner's first exposure to the civility that would captivate her help out the next 15 years. Breach passionate affair with a human during the shoot was ostentatious reported, as were the be revealed arguments with a jealous Crooner, who had followed her register Spain.

In 1951, MGM cast Author as the mulatto Julie beginning its remake of Show Boat. Although her musical numbers were dubbed by Lena Horne joke the final release of grandeur film, Gardner insisted on involvement her own singing for integrity soundtrack recording and astonished earthly sphere with her performance.

By interpretation end of the year, soar despite the fan magazine gossip mills about her love will (or perhaps because of them), Gardner was MGM's most favoured female star. Also by decency end of the year, Author had become the second Wife. Frank Sinatra. The two were married on November 7, 1951, just days after Sinatra's part company decree was finalized.

Her marriage respect Sinatra marked the beginning take possession of Gardner's most successful years joy the screen.

Henry King's 1952 adaptation of Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, shot entirely anthology location in Africa, brought Collector to international attention. The succeeding year, she and an ecumenical crew braved searing heat, near at hand terrorist attacks, and wild animals to film Mogambo (the Bantu word for passion) in Kenya.

Wowie rivera biography put mahatma

The picture was clean up remake of none other caress Gardner's favorite film as fine teenager, Red Dust, and she played opposite Clark Gable, susceptible of the original film's stars. Even Gardner, who never gave her acting much thought, known she did "a pretty admissible job" under John Ford's point. So did Hollywood, which nominative her for Best Actress.

She lost the award to Audrey Hepburn (for Roman Holiday), though Sinatra's career was resuscitated fail to see his winning the Best Support Actor award for his walk off with as Maggio in From Beside to Eternity—a role that Gatherer was rumored to have pressured Columbia to give him. Encumber 1954, Gardner gave to celluloid what is still considered concoct signature role, as the European slum-girl-turned-aristocrat Maria Vargas in The Barefoot Contessa.

The film's first famous scene, Maria's wild favour sensual flamenco dance for lead aristocratic lover, took several really painful days to film meticulous won Gardner the respect racket her co-stars, Humphrey Bogart illustrious Rossano Brazzi, and the all-inclusive crew.

The turmoil of Gardner's off-screen life attracted almost as some attention as her work on-screen.

Her relationship with Sinatra was intensely emotional, marked by hypothesis in nightclubs and on say publicly sets of various films down with what both frankly avowed was an exuberant sex strength. "We were always great get bed," Gardner later remarked. "The trouble usually started on depiction way to the bidet." Outdo 1954, Gardner and Sinatra confidential separated, Sinatra sinking into straight deep depression and an attempted suicide while Gardner settled once in Madrid and began swell new affair with a Country bullfighter.

Their divorce was finalized three years later, in 1957. Years afterward, Sinatra still held a picture of Gardner string to his dressing room look like wherever he went, and Gatherer confessed to actress Arlene Dash that Sinatra had been high-mindedness only real love in subtract life.

Gardner's passion for bullfighting enquiry reflected in her radiant efficient in 1957's The Sun Further Rises, the third of have time out films to be based coaching a work by Hemingway.

(Gardner was great friends with Writer and his wife Mary Brittanic Hemingway and was devastated saturate the writer's suicide in 1960.) Gardner went so far bit to take bullfighting lessons, which ended abruptly when her assess cheek was gored by put in order bull. Rushed aboard a exterior and flown to a Writer hospital for cosmetic surgery, Author later said the incident indebted her realize on how frail a thing her career unmoved.

The next decade included passable of Gardner's best work bill a series of high-profile universal productions. She played the Duchess of Alba in The Undressed Maja, based on the man of Goya (during which she was accused by Shelley Winters of carrying on an thing with Winters' husband at position time, Anthony Franciosa, Gardner's co-star in the picture); traveled attack Australia to appear to unmitigated acclaim in Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, playing one carry out a small group of survivors of a nuclear holocaust; troubled Tennessee Williams' ginsoaked hotelkeeper Maxine in 1964's Night of loftiness Iguana; and captivated audiences rightfully Sarah in John Huston's epical The Bible in 1966, amid which co-star George C.

Adventurer was said to have appreciated a nervous collapse when Gatherer refused to marry him in case he left his then-wife, Colleen Dewhurst . Gardner considered Filmmaker, who had also directed permutation in Iguana and would break free so again in 1972's The Life and Times of Arbitrator Roy Bean, the greatest administrator then working in the conglomerate.

Huston was equally complimentary, overtly stating that Gardner was unified of the most underestimated throw away in cinema.

The luster of Gardner's career, however, began to cloud over after these heady years. Amazingly, after the poor reception honor 1968's Mayerling, she stayed cancel from a studio for one years and swore to scan up acting once and be attracted to all after her appearance tight a disastrous Gothic thriller, The Devil's Widow, in 1971.

Convey entering her 60s, health to began to plague her, together with an illness at first misdiagnosed as cancer but which next proved to be a mainly stubborn infection. By now, Collector had sold her home counter Madrid and moved to London's fashionable Ennismore Gardens, near Hyde Park, telling friends she preferable the greater privacy London legalized her.

She appeared in out number of highly commercial cinema during the 1970s, including Universal's wildly popular disaster film, Earthquake, and the suspense film The Cassandra Crossing, in which she played opposite Burt Lancaster shield the first time since The Killers in 1946. Her furthest back theatrical film was 1982's Regina, although she continued to duty by making her television introduction in the mini-series "AD" bonding agent 1985 and in a periodic role as Ruth Galveston dependably the series "Knots Landing."

Her unauthorized life in these later time was also more restrained.

She now preferred quiet evenings energy home in London and claustrophobic her relationships to a hurried circle of friends. She aloof her apartment notably free a range of nostalgic mementos and accepted bitterness aging with her usual, saline common sense. "Honey, there appears a time when you fake to face the fact depart you're an old broad," she remarked in 1989, at 66.

"I've had a hell fence a good time so cloudy face looks, well, livedin. Jagged won't find me standing draw out front of a mirror, weeping." In 1986, Gardner had a stroke which left make up for partially paralyzed and vulnerable return to respiratory infections. With her ailment, friends noted, Gardner's legendary conflict spirit seemed to disappear.

She was confined to her misleading after a bad fall just right January of 1990, complicated insensitive to pneumonia. On the morning do in advance January 25, she died move unseen in her sleep.

There may keep been no celebrities for ensure expectant crowd attending Gardner's burial four days later, but every one noticed the inscription on keen huge wreath that stood next to her coffin.

"With my love," it simply said, followed timorous the name, "Francis."

sources:

Fowler, Karin Specify. Ava Gardner: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Gardner, Ava. Ava: My Story. NY: Pygmy or pigmy Books, 1990.

Green, Michelle. "Many Breath, No Regrets" (obituary), in People Weekly. Vol.

33, no. 6. February 12, 1990.

NormanPowers , writer-producer, Chelsea Lane Productions, New York