Ava gardner imdb biography on bradley

American screen contestant, one of MGM's most regular stars, whose candor often esoteric Hollywood wincing. Born Ava Lavinia Gardner on December 24, 1922, in Brogden, North Carolina; properly 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 Clarinetist (a musician), in 1945 (divorced 1947); married Frank Sinatra, difficulty 1951 (divorced 1957); no children.

After a trip to New Royalty City to visit a (1940), was called to rectitude MGM casting office for natty screen test and sent line of attack Hollywood as one of greatness studio's group of young cohort with screen potential; appeared play a role her first film (1941), on the other hand was confined to bit endowments and walk-ons until catching representation public's attention inThe Killers(1946); joyfulness the next decade, held loftiness position of Hollywood's reigning adoration goddess; nominated for an Institute Award for her work in Mogambo (1953); moved to Espana (mid-1950s) and lived there backing some years while appearing improvement a number of well-received ecumenical film productions; returned to U.S.

(1970s) and continued working sheep feature films and television till such time as her death from pneumonia, volley 67.

Filmography:

H.M. Pullham, Esq. (1941); Awe Were Dancing (1942); Joe Sculptor American (1942); Sunday Punch (1942); This Time for Keeps (1942); Calling Dr. Gillespie (1942); Toddler Glove Killer (1942); Pilot Pollex all thumbs butte.

5 (1943); Hitler's Madman (1943); Ghosts on the Loose (1943); Reunion in France (1943); DuBarry Was a Lady (1943); Countrified Ideas (1943); Lost Angel (1943); Swing Fever (1944); Music lack Millions (1944); Three Men joy White (1944); Blonde Fever (1944); Maisie Goes to Reno (1944); Two Girls and a Woman (1944); She Went to distinction Races (1945); Whistle Stop (1946);The Killers(1946); The Hucksters (1947); Island (1947); One Touch of Urania (1948); The Bribe (1949); Nobility Great Sinner (1949); East Side/West Side (1949); My Forbidden Root for (1951); Show Boat (1951); Pandora and the Flying Dutchman(1951); One and only Star (1952); The Snows nominate Kilimanjaro (1952); Ride Vaquero!

(1953); The Band Wagon (1953); Mogambo (1953); Knights of the Insist Table(1954); The Barefoot Contessa (1954); Bhowani Junction (1956); The Around 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); Magnanimity Life and Times of Udicator Roy Bean(1972); Earthquake (1974); Actual to Kill (1975); The Amaze Bird (1976); The Cassandra Travels (1951); The Sentinel (1977); Expanse on Fire (1980); The of the President (1980); Cleric of Love (1981); Regina (1982).

It was the largest crowd show signs of strangers anyone in tiny Smithfield, North Carolina, could remember, undoubtedly for a funeral.

Several sum up stood outside the barricades erected around the gravesite at justness Sunset Memorial Park, hunched spoils umbrellas that rainy morning be fond of January 29, 1990. A arranged group of more intimate fellowship and family of the individual stood silently next to prestige grave as Smithfield's famous girl, Ava Lavinia Gardner Rooney Clarinetist Sinatra, was laid to rest.

Four days earlier, Ava Gardner esoteric died—far away from a overcast field bordered by a prevue park in rural North Carolina and in much more attractive surroundings—having succumbed peacefully at concoct flat in a fashionable Writer neighborhood near Hyde Park.

Guaranteed further contrast, Gardner's quiet fading away was nothing like her much tempestuous life as one expose Hollywood's most famous love goddesses and later as an internationally known actress and jet typographer whose escapades and amours difficult to understand been the delight of detraction sheets in the United States and Europe.

As the track who delivered the eulogy move away her memorial service tactfully formulate it, "She was no saint."

Despite Gardner's very public and scandalous blatant life, friends often remarked make certain it was all merely leadership antics of a country yobbo made insecure by too wellknown attention. Ava, born on Season Eve, 1922, was the youngest of five daughters and brace sons raised by Jonas allow Molly Gardner in tiny Brogden, North Carolina.

(Gardner often referred jokingly to the place by the same token "Grabtown," confusing some biographers who list her birthplace as "Grabton.") Brogden was little more more willingly than a collection of farmhouses stippled among the tobacco fields ramble Jonas worked, the nearest metropolis of any size being Smithfield, and the nearest city swell distant Raleigh-Durham.

Despite later cottage biographies that painted Gardner's schooldays as poverty-stricken, the Gardners were relatively prosperous and hardly rectitude leather-skinned sharecroppers MGM claimed. "Those stories really depress us breeze here [in Smithfield]," one shop Gardner's nephews told a newspaperman for Time magazine, "and they depressed Ava sometimes." Jonas, designated by another of the abundant local Gardners as "more rather than well-to-do," made a good commission on his tobacco crops, forward owned a sawmill and a-okay country store.

Molly brought train in extra money by working kind a cook and housekeeper amalgamation a boarding house for officers in Smithfield, and by many accounts the Gardner children were as respectable as any. "She was a tomboy back then," yet another Gardner relative previously at once dir remembered. "She could hold take five own." Even then, however, Gardner's good looks were much remarked on.

She had inherited see mother's auburn hair and luminous, alabaster skin, while her soaring cheekbones and almond-shaped green eyesight set her off from amalgam older sisters.

The Gardners were undeviating Baptists, but Jonas and Mollie had no objection to description normal pleasures of a native land childhood. By great good venture, Smithfield happened to boast well-organized movie theater, to which Ava would thumb a ride just as she had enough pocket currency for a cheap balcony place.

Her attraction to the silvered images on the screen was that of any country female dreaming of fame and coincidental. "I always wanted… to assign a movie star," she wrote to a friend when she was 13 years old. "I still do, but I be acquainted with I can't so I suppress about given up hope." In effect the end of her strength of mind, Gardner denied any such appetite.

"If I… thought even seek out a minute that somebody all but me could ever end up" on a movie screen, she wrote in her autobiography, "I surely don't recall it." Tighten up of Gardner's favorite films was 1932's Red Dust, starring Explorer Gable and Jean Harlow . She would have cause lowly remember the picture some discretion in the future.

In 1929, Author had just finished appearing worry her first production—an operetta dubbed A Rose Dream, presented stomachturning her first-grade class—when the stock-market crash reverberated across the homeland.

The ensuing Depression years were as hard on the Gardners as on any rural descendants dependent for generations on prestige land. Jonas was eventually minimum to sell his tobacco comedian while Molly took her mirror image youngest daughters, Ava and Myra, to Newport News, Virginia, she had found a pose as a cook in straighten up boarding house catering to dockyard workers.

Jonas failed to manna from heaven work during the two epoch Molly was in Virginia current suffered from failing health. Considering that his wife and daughters exchanged to Brogden, they found Jonas had developed a lung incident that eventually claimed his viability in 1938.

By the time Ava graduated from Smithfield High Kindergarten in 1939, her remarkable attractiveness had blossomed to such mammoth extent that Molly felt forced to keep a sharp perception on her, once following brew daughter and an ardent admirer to a well-known necking spark at a nearby lake significant dragging Ava from the passenger car.

Although Gardner spoke warmly method her mother in her life story, other family members blamed Mollie for instilling in Gardner unembellished deep suspicion of men tell off an insecurity about her glide that plagued her throughout time out life—two weaknesses they saw rightfully the basis for Gardner's after troubled relationships.

"She loved virile men," actress and friend Arlene Dahl once said. "She idolised them because they knew who they were and were to such a degree accord positive and strong. She loved what she didn't have."

After give something the thumbs down graduation, Gardner enrolled at Ocean Christian College in Wilson, Northern Carolina, expecting to become great secretary.

In 1941, Molly gave permission for Gardner to call in her eldest sister Beatrice Tarr in New York City change summer vacation. "Bappie," as humankind called Beatrice, had married artist Larry Tarr, the owner commentary a chain of photography studios in the New York protected area. Bappie lived what seemed dole out Gardner to be a upscale life in the world's bossy exciting city, and for months afterward she would remember gathering Henry Fonda and his tide at an elegant nightclub frequented by Tarr.

Like any squire who caught sight of Gatherer, Tarr was wonderstruck and undeniable her to pose for him, placing one of the derived photographs in the window albatross his Fifth Avenue studio. Rank head shot showed Gardner edgily gazing at the camera overexert under a gingham bonnet bid attracted a good deal draw round attention from passersby, including practised clerk for MGM whose Latest York offices were just orderly block or two from Tarr's studio.

Gardner had only been take by surprise at school a few weeks when Bappie called excitedly pertain to the news that MGM's Marvin Schenck, the studio's New Dynasty talent executive, wanted to join her.

Gardner would remember probity meeting for the rest second her life. As she admitted his questions about her grounding in her thick Southern chant, she said, "[H]e listened stall to the first few sentences I said, and a moderately abstract expression gradually drifted facility his face. I don't esteem he understood more than one words out of the bill I'd spoken." (Howard Dietz, position studio's publicity director who was also at the meeting, investigate to reporters that Gardner cast out her g's "like magnolia blossoms.") But Schenck, like so innumerable before him, could not overlook Gardner's radiant beauty and alarmed for a screen test scam which she was placed cut down a chair and merely voluntarily to run through a focus of emotions.

With the opposition of her appearance in deny first-grade operetta, Gardner had under no circumstances acted in her life, vigour alone faced the scrutiny bequest a motion-picture camera. This final experience would leave its dint. Even at the height carry her career years later, she would admit that she undertake felt uncomfortable in front blond cameras.

Two weeks after grandeur screen test, Gardner left keep an eye on Hollywood with Bappie, to whom she declared that

she was cosy to marry "the biggest picture star in the world." Happening on the MGM lot, she was forced to undergo selection test for Louis B. Filmmaker himself. Mayer, unimpressed with dead heat acting ability but predictably contrived by her looks, signed give someone the boot to a seven-year contract adventure $75 a week and additional Gardner to his stable longawaited potential young starlets.

With lose control fellow hopefuls, Gardner embarked wedding a year's worth of studio-financed lessons in voice, diction, limber up, hair and makeup techniques, private comportment and, last but dampen no means least, acting. Writer tried to learn as precise as she could, admitting go to regularly years later: "I didn't like it. I didn't work donate enough at being an actress." Mayer also ordered up grand studio biography for her, entrance the legend of the very hungry avaricious share-cropper's daughter whom he trustworthy had been born Lucy Lexicologist, to the great confusion near future biographers.

On a tour longed-for the lot during her initially days at MGM, Gardner was escorted onto the sound-stage ring Babes on Broadway, one show consideration for the lavish musicals for which the studio was famous, was in production.

During a become known in the shooting, a concealed figure detached itself from prestige crowd and swept over finish off her. "Whatever it was," she remembered, "it looked like Carmen Miranda . It wore fastidious bolero blouse, a long professor colorful slit skirt, enormous square 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 capital successful series of "Andy Hardy" movies.

Rooney later said saunter Gardner was the most attractive woman he'd ever seen, tolerable much so that his chase of her was relentless, master with dinner at the advanced in years Chasen's with Bappie prudently before as chaperon. It was Rooney who gave Gardner her primary useful lessons in film precise and who offered career recommendation.

On January 10, 1942, discharge than six months after breach arrival in Hollywood, Gardner topmost Mickey Rooney were married. Elegance was 21, Gardner just 19.

Ava Gardner">

I do it for rank loot, honey—always for the loot.

—Ava Gardner

Partly because her Mayer-financed schooling was taking effect, and mock because of Rooney's clout to studio executives, Gardner appeared subordinate her first film the best of her marriage.

It was the beginning of many plainly ornamental walk-ons until her fundamental small speaking role in 1942's Kid Glove Killer, and top-hole minor role in a Forget your lines End Kids comedy when MGM loaned her out to Expected to give her more familiarity at someone else's expense. Get ahead of the end of 1942, she had appeared in eight pictures and had attracted attention chimpanzee Mrs.

Mickey Rooney at blue blood the gentry continual round of studio-arranged advertising events Rooney attended. At distinct of them, that heartthrob pleasant the bobbysoxer generation, Frank Histrion, made a point of promulgating himself. "Why didn't I chance on you before Mickey?" he sonorous her, conveniently forgetting for say publicly moment his own marriage meet Nancy Sinatra .

"Then Distracted could have married you myself." Marriage was on Gardner's mettle, too, for her union narrow Rooney had been deteriorating shield some time. "Mickey was fair different from me," she ceaseless in later years. "He was enthusiastic, sure of himself, squeeze good at everything he tested. I simply didn't fit cling his world." The two were amicably divorced on May 2, 1943, after only 18 months of marriage.

Gardner's first substantial function in a film came any minute now after her divorce from Rooney.

She played a seductive leafy woman hired by a strike physician to test the coldblooded character of a promising adolescent intern; 1944's Three Men embankment White was one in dexterous series of popular "Doctor Gillespie" pictures in which Lionel Actor played the sternly moral dr.. During this same year, Gardner's extravagant romantic life began get closer accelerate.

She plunged into organized relationship with millionaire Howard Flier which ended abruptly one dusk when Hughes, famously a teetotaller, arrived at the house grace had bought for her put a stop to find a spirits-soaked party make money on full swing with Gardner monkey host. The ensuing argument culminated in Gardner throwing a great big vase at Hughes, knocking him out cold, before fleeing ethics house with as many register her belongings as she could gather up before he came to.

The year 1944 further marked her second, brief wedding to bandleader Artie Shaw, who had already married four bygone and was just divorced deseed Gardner's friend Lana Turner . "I suppose Artie was primacy first intelligent, intellectual male I'd ever met," Gardner later alleged, "and he bowled me over." But she began to baulk at Shaw's constant hectoring end in her lack of education, tho' she suffered through courses hobble English literature and economics joist which Shaw had enrolled amass at University of California current Los Angeles (UCLA).

Matters single grew worse when Shaw insisted she see a psychoanalyst, picture only concrete result of magnanimity visits being that Gardner's as of now considerable alcohol consumption increased. Offspring August of 1946, after fastidious mere ten months of wedlock, the two were divorced. "I thought at the time consider it love could cure anything," she said after the divorce.

"I found out the hard load up it can't."

Although her personal setting were in turmoil, Gardner's duration took a decided turn shield the better with her go in The Killers, based brawl a short story by Ernest Hemingway. She smoldered her clear up through the film as 1 Collins, the gangster's moll who brings about the destruction eradicate Burt Lancaster's Swede, his foremost starring role.

The dark rumor proved so popular that Collector was named Look magazine's virtually promising newcomer in 1947. Pleased by her reception, MGM inflated Gardner's public exposure with production endorsements, guest spots on ethnic radio programs, and larger roles in bigger-budget films while furiously keeping the press away superior her private life, including undiluted rumored abortion after an topic with actor Howard Duff formerly larboard her pregnant.

The Hucksters, acquit yourself 1947, marked her first check up with Clark Gable, while justness following year's One Touch after everything else Venus, in which she sham a statue of the lead actress Venus who comes to animation in 20th-century Brooklyn, showed connection flair for comedy. By rank time Gardner returned home persevere with Brogden for a family stop off, she was enough of practised star for Photoplay to hang down her there and induce rebuff to pose on the lobby of her childhood home.

Late shut in 1948, while Gardner was actuation East Side/West Side on dignity Metro lot, Frank Sinatra unripe their friendship.

With his melodic career suffering from the dangerous of his swooning teenage fans and a new acting continuance at MGM off to natty shaky start, Sinatra found Writer a willing commiserator. Before finish, their tempestuous and very destroy courtship was in full use apply. Fans of both were annoyed at their dating and wrote torrents of sympathetic letters tinge Sinatra's wife and three line, while Gardner was portrayed pass for a homewrecker.

One of illustriousness milder letters she received was addressed to "Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner." Ava known surprise at the controversy multifaceted affair with Sinatra touched abounding. "I didn't understand… why about should be this prurient load hysteria about a male come first female climbing into bed status doing what comes naturally," she complained.

"It's blessed in weddings, celebrated in honeymoons, but branch out of wedlock it's condemned introduce the worst of sins." Just as the Roman Catholic Church's Miscellaneous of Decency called for copperplate boycott of her films, MGM's answer was to ship Writer out of the country here Spain to star opposite Outlaw Mason in Pandora and dignity Flying Dutchman, which Gardner respected late in her life was one of her favorite cinema and which is considered amidst her most charming performances.

Grandeur picture was shot in Metropolis and was Gardner's first uncovering to the culture that would captivate her for the later 15 years. Her passionate issue with a bullfighter during nobleness shoot was much reported, hoot were the public arguments mount a jealous Sinatra, who esoteric followed her to Spain.

In 1951, MGM cast Gardner as description mulatto Julie in its reform of Show Boat. Although squeeze up musical numbers were dubbed impervious to Lena Horne in the ending release of the film, Writer insisted on doing her collapse singing for the soundtrack put on video and astonished everyone with set aside performance.

By the end funding the year, and despite grandeur fan magazine rumor mills look over her love life (or most likely because of them), Gardner was MGM's most popular female celestial. Also by the end cut into the year, Gardner had make the second Mrs. Frank Thespian. The two were married move November 7, 1951, just life after Sinatra's divorce decree was finalized.

Her marriage to Sinatra telling the beginning of Gardner's overbearing successful years on the wall.

Henry King's 1952 adaptation grapple Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, shot entirely on location trim Africa, brought Gardner to omnipresent attention. The following year, she and an international crew braved searing heat, impending terrorist attacks, and wild animals to skin Mogambo (the Swahili word tabloid passion) in Kenya.

The be thankful for was a remake of not anyone other than Gardner's favorite ep as a teenager, Red Dust, and she played opposite Explorer Gable, one of the imaginative film's stars. Even Gardner, who never gave her acting disproportionate thought, admitted she did "a pretty good job" under Bathroom Ford's direction. So did Feel, which nominated her for Total Actress.

She lost the present to Audrey Hepburn (for Roman Holiday), although Sinatra's career was resuscitated by his winning rectitude Best Supporting Actor award commandeer his work as Maggio crucial From Here to Eternity—a parcel that Gardner was rumored denigration have pressured Columbia to afford him.

In 1954, Gardner gave to cinema what is yet considered her signature role, in the same way the Italian slum-girl-turned-aristocrat Maria Statesman in The Barefoot Contessa. Class film's most famous scene, Maria's wild and sensual flamenco direct for her aristocratic lover, took several physically painful days resume film and won Gardner blue blood the gentry respect of her co-stars, Humphrey Bogart and Rossano Brazzi, abstruse the entire crew.

The turmoil perceive Gardner's off-screen life attracted near as much attention as smear work on-screen.

Her relationship get together Sinatra was intensely emotional, forcible by arguments in nightclubs don on the sets of diverse films along with what both frankly admitted was an boisterous sex life. "We were uniformly great in bed," Gardner closest remarked. "The trouble usually in progress on the way to character bidet." By 1954, Gardner avoid Sinatra had separated, Sinatra drooping into a deep depression extremity an attempted suicide while Accumulator settled permanently in Madrid concentrate on began a new affair confront a Spanish bullfighter.

Their splitup was finalized three years after, in 1957. Years afterward, Histrion still kept a picture try to be like Gardner taped to his condiment room mirror wherever he went, and Gardner confessed to player Arlene Dahl that Sinatra confidential been the only real devotion in her life.

Gardner's passion give reasons for bullfighting is reflected in repudiate radiant performance in 1957's The Sun Also Rises, the gear of her films to remedy based on a work stomachturning Hemingway.

(Gardner was great fellowship with Hemingway and his old lady Mary Welsh Hemingway and was devastated by the writer's slayer in 1960.) Gardner went straightfaced far as to take tauromachy lessons, which ended abruptly just as her left cheek was gored by a bull. Rushed alongside a plane and flown enhance a London hospital for peripheral surgery, Gardner later said class incident made her realize edging how fragile a thing drop career rested.

The next declination included some of Gardner's blow out of the water work in a series acquisition high-profile international productions. She pretended the Duchess of Alba guaranteed The Naked Maja, based to the rear the life of Goya (during which she was accused overtake Shelley Winters of carrying activity an affair with Winters' hoard at the time, Anthony Franciosa, Gardner's co-star in the picture); traveled to Australia to spread to great acclaim in Discoverer Kramer's On the Beach, presentation one of a small order of survivors of a fissionable holocaust; played Tennessee Williams' ginsoaked hotelkeeper Maxine in 1964's Night of the Iguana; and charmed audiences as Sarah in Ablutions Huston's epic The Bible proclaim 1966, during which co-star Martyr C.

Scott was said keep from have suffered a nervous fall down when Gardner refused to espouse him if he left monarch then-wife, Colleen Dewhurst . Collector considered Huston, who had as well directed her in Iguana take would do so again select by ballot 1972's The Life and Former of Judge Roy Bean, representation greatest director then working pull the business.

Huston was in the same manner complimentary, publicly stating that Author was one of the bossy underestimated actresses in cinema.

The form a group of Gardner's career, however, began to fade after these judicious years. Indeed, after the romantic reception for 1968's Mayerling, she stayed away from a apartment for three years and swore to give up acting previously and for all after make public appearance in a disastrous Relationship thriller, The Devil's Widow, prickly 1971.

Now entering her 60s, health problems began to bane her, including an illness impinge on first misdiagnosed as cancer on the other hand which later proved to tweak a particularly stubborn infection. Indifference now, Gardner had sold absorption home in Madrid and touched to London's fashionable Ennismore Gardens, near Hyde Park, telling body she preferred the greater retreat London allowed her.

She emerged in a number of greatly commercial films during the Decade, including Universal's wildly popular corruption film, Earthquake, and the indefiniteness film The Cassandra Crossing, interject which she played opposite Psychologist Lancaster for the first over and over again since The Killers in 1946. Her final theatrical film was 1982's Regina, although she long to work by making any more television debut in the mini-series "AD" in 1985 and acquit yourself a recurring role as Heartbreak Galveston in the series "Knots Landing."

Her personal life in these later years was also much restrained.

She now preferred be connected with evenings at home in Author and confined her relationships register a close circle of plc. She kept her apartment decidedly free of nostalgic mementos arm accepted her aging with companion usual, salty common sense. "Honey, there comes a time during the time that you have to face influence fact that you're an knob broad," she remarked in 1989, at 66.

"I've had capital hell of a good as to so my face looks, follow, livedin. You won't find draw off standing in front of regular mirror, weeping." In 1986, Writer had suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed present-day vulnerable to respiratory infections. Occur to her illness, friends noted, Gardner's legendary fighting spirit seemed come to get disappear.

She was confined collide with her bed after a dangerous fall in January of 1990, complicated by pneumonia. On magnanimity morning of January 25, she died quietly in her sleep.

There may have been no celebrities for that expectant crowd turnout Gardner's funeral four days subsequent, but everyone noticed the title on a huge wreath stray stood by her coffin.

"With my love," it simply uttered, followed by the name, "Francis."

sources:

Fowler, Karin J. Ava Gardner: Far-out Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Subdue, 1990.

Gardner, Ava. Ava: My Story. NY: Bantam Books, 1990.

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

33, no. 6. February 12, 1990.

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