Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922 – January 25, 1990) was an American actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood. She first signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew critics' attention in 1946 with her performance in Robert Siodmak's film noir The Killers.
During the 1950s, Gardner established herself as a leading lady and one of the era's top stars with films like Show Boat and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman both in 1951. Gardner went on to star in a series of action adventures throughout the 1950s, including The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Mogambo (1953), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). At the end of the decade she starred opposite Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire in On the Beach (1959).
Gardner continued her film career for three more decades, appearing in the films 55 Days at Peking (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), and Mayerling (1968). She continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death in 1990, at the age of 67. Mogambo earned her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Gardner also received nominations for a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress, for her performance in The Night of the Iguana. Gardner remained lifelong friends with Peck and was active in progressive politics. She died in 1990 after suffering a stroke in 1986. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gardner No. 25 on its greatest female screen legends list.
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. When Gardner was born, by community standards, they were "better than well-to-do" with her father having the deed to their tobacco and cotton farm, and owning a sawmill and a country store. She was of English and Scots Irish ancestry.
She was raised in her mother's Baptist faith. During the Depression, while Gardner was still young, the family lost their property. Gardner's mother received an offer to work as a cook and housekeeper at a dormitory for teachers at the nearby Brogden School that included board for the family. Gardner's father sharecropped tobacco and supplemented the dwindling work with odd jobs at sawmills. In 1931, the teachers' school closed, forcing the family to finally give up on their property dreams and move to Newport News, Virginia, where Gardner's mother found work managing a boarding house for the city's many shipworkers.
While in Newport News, Gardner's father became ill and died from bronchitis in 1938. Gardner was 15 years old. After her father's death, the family moved to Rock Ridge near Wilson, North Carolina. Gardner's mother ran another boarding house for teachers and Gardner attended high school in Rock Ridge. She graduated in 1939. The family was not well off and she had to wear hand-me-down clothes to school, to the derision of her classmates. She then attended secretarial classes at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson for about a year. Both Gardner and a close friend of hers, Alberta Cooney, recalled that she had a preference for being barefoot.
Gardner was visiting her sister in New York City in the summer of 1940 when her brother-in-law, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait as a gift for her mother. He was so pleased with the results that he displayed the finished product in the front window of his photography studio on Fifth Avenue.
Barnard Duhan, a legal clerk at Loews Theatres, spotted Gardner's portrait in her brother-in-law's studio. At the time, Duhan often posed as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) talent scout to meet girls, using the fact that MGM was a subsidiary of Loews. Duhan entered Gardner's brother-in-law's studio and tried to get her number, but he was rebuffed by the receptionist. Duhan made the comment: "somebody should send her info to MGM." Her brother-in-law did so shortly after Gardner, who at the time was a student at Atlantic Christian College, traveled to New York.
She was interviewed at MGM's New York office by Al Altman, head of MGM's New York talent department. With cameras rolling, he directed the 18-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 strong Southern accent made understanding her difficult for him. Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, however, purportedly sent a telegram to Altman: "She can't sing. She can't act. She can't talk. She's terrific!" She was offered a standard contract by the studio and left school for Hollywood in 1941, with her sister accompanying her. MGM's first order of business was to provide her with a speech coach because her Carolina drawl was nearly incomprehensible to them, and Harriet Lee as her singing teacher.
Her first appearance in a feature film was as a walk-on in the Norma Shearer vehicle We Were Dancing (1942). Fifteen bit parts later, she received her first screen billing in Ghosts on the Loose (1943), and she is featured by name on the theatrical poster. After five years of bit parts, mostly at MGM and many of them uncredited, Gardner came to prominence in the Mark Hellinger production The Killers (1946), playing the femme fatale Kitty Collins. Although she had good reviews, she had a fragile self-image. "Ava wouldn't even go eat in the commissary because she was so scared to walk in and see Lana Turner and Greer Garson," says actress Arlene Dahl. The next twelve years began with The Hucksters (1947) and culminated with On the Beach, the Oscar nomination for Mogambo being the high point. Other films included One Touch of Venus (1948), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and The Sun Also Rises. Off-camera Gardner was witty and pithy, as in her assessment of director John Ford, who directed Mogambo ("The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!").
In The Barefoot Contessa, she played the role of doomed beauty Maria Vargas, a fiercely independent woman who goes from Spanish dancer to international movie star with the help of a Hollywood director played by Humphrey Bogart, with tragic consequences. Gardner's decision to accept the role was influenced by her own lifelong habit of going barefoot. Gardner played the role of Guinevere in Knights of the Round Table (1953), with actor Robert Taylor as Sir Lancelot. Indicative of her sophistication, she portrayed a duchess, a baroness, and other women of noble lineage in her films of the 1950s.
Gardner played the role of Soledad in The Angel Wore Red (1960) with Dirk Bogarde as the male lead. She was billed between Charlton Heston and David Niven for 55 Days at Peking (1963), which was set in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The following year, she played her last major leading role in the critically acclaimed 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 Puerto Vallarta, 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 Kerr. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance.
She next appeared again with Burt Lancaster, her co-star from The Killers, this time with Kirk Douglas and Fredric March, in Seven Days in May (1964), a thriller about an attempted military takeover of the US government. Gardner played a former love interest of Lancaster's who could be instrumental in preventing a coup against the President of the United States.
John Huston chose Gardner for the part of Sarah, the wife of Abraham (played by George C. Scott), in the Dino De Laurentiis film The Bible: In the Beginning..., which was released in 1966. In a 1964 interview, she talked about why she accepted the role: