American actress, onscreen from 1941 in a career of more than 60 movies. An exotic beauty, her life and loves were dramatic and lusty. Legend repeats the story that when she made her first film test, the studio heads said, “She can’t act, she didn’t talk; she’s sensational.” She arrived in Hollywood with her eldest sister on the morning of 23 August 1941, under contract at $75 a week. She made a series of forgettable pictures that started with “My Brother Talks to Horses.” In the ’40s, she stood out in two films, “The Killers” and “The Hucksters,” and came into her own in technicolor in Metro’s remake of “Show Boat.”
Gardner was the youngest of seven kids born to a cotton and tobacco farmer. On her first day at MGM, 18 years old, she met Mickey Rooney and soon learned that he was not one to take no for an answer. They were married on 10 January 1942 for one year and five days of rows, mostly over Mickey’s philandering. The divorce decree came through on 21 May 1943. She fell in love with Artie Shaw at first sight and spent eight months dining and dancing together and talking into the night before she moved in with him to begin an affair. They married on 17 October 1945, whereupon Shaw set about in earnest to improve Gardiner. With Rooney, she had taken lessons in golf, tennis and swimming; now she was plunged into literature and culture, with extension courses at UCLA. She began to feel increasingly demeaned by her sophisticated husband. They broke up in a year. Gardiner had met Frank Sinatra when she was married to Rooney and when she moved out from Shaw, found they were apartment house neighbors. Early in 1949, they attended the same party in Palm Springs, and fell in love. Sinatra was at the lowest point in his career and Gardiner was on her way up. It was a passionate, overwhelming, tempestuous affair that became global when she filmed “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” in Spain. They were desperately in love, possessive, jealous and explosive. They were both obsessed with sexual jealousy, around which most of their fights escalated. On 29 May 1951, Nancy Sinatra agreed to a divorce, that finally came through in late October. Ava and Frank married on 7 November 1951. It was a stormy road for the next few years. In 1952 while filming “Mogambo” in Nairobi, she discovered that she was pregnant. Both she and Frank had soaring careers as he was headed for “From Here to Eternity,” which reestablished his stardom, and she decided on an abortion, on 23 November 1952. In early 1953 she again found herself pregnant, and made the same resolution. On 29 October 1953, they announced their divorce.
Her romances and affairs were well publicized, as with Howard Hughes, George C. Scott and Robert Mitchum, bullfighters and playboys.
With the filming of several overseas productions, Gardner fell in love with Europe and left the U.S. for good in December 1955, moving to Spain. In 1968 she moved to London. Over her Madrid years she shed the uncertain, often inhibited persona she had shown in California. Many a matador dedicated his bull to her when she appeared in the “corrida” on a Sunday afternoon, and many a night she could be seen in Madrid’s seedier dives joining the flamenco dancers with clapping and wild gypsy cries.
Gardner’s films include “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Barefoot Contessa,” and Mogambo,” which won an Oscar nomination in 1950. After 1967 she was semi-retired with only three pictures in the next ten years, including “Earthquake.” She became more reclusive, living in her London flat.
In 1986, Gardiner had a stroke which affected her walking and made her left arm close to useless. After a long illness, she died of pneumonia on 25 January 1990 in London, England, at age 67.
Link to Wikipedia biography