Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner Ava Gardner was one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, starring in such films as The Killers, Show Boat, Mogambo (for which she was nominated for an Academy Award), On the Beach and Night of the Iguana.
A small-town girl from North Carolina, Gardner got her break in 1941 at age 18 while visiting her sister in New York. Her sister’s husband was a photographer and offered to take her portrait, and she consented. He liked the results so much that he displayed the picture in the front window of his studio.
This led to a screen test at the MGM office in New York, and while the talent scout thought she was a looker, he didn’t bother to record her voice due to her thick Southern accent. It wasn’t until he saw the results in the screening room that he saw how much the camera loved the young woman. After sending the test on to Hollywood, he received a telegram back from MGM head Louis B. Mayer that read: “She can’t sing, she can’t act, she can’t talk, she’s terrific!”
Ava Gardner in 1951’s “Show Boat” Gardner was linked up with a vocal coach to lose her native Carolina drawl and soon began making bit appearances in various films, finally scoring a big role in producer Mark Hellinger’s noir film The Killers.
It wasn’t long thereafter that Ava Gardner was declared a star.
Offscreen, Gardner’s romances were even more stellar. After arriving in Los Angeles, she soon married fellow MGM contract player Mickey Rooney, but divorced a year later. After that she was married — also for a year — to big band leader Artie Shaw. She kept up a long friendship with Howard Hughes, though she said they were never romantically linked.
But the big romantic fireworks came with Gardner’s six-year marriage to Frank Sinatra. Sinatra had left his wife Nancy for Ava, and their subsequent marriage was savaged in the gossip columns, with Gardner characterized as a marriage-destroying femme fatale. But however tumultuous the relationship, both Gardner and Sinatra declared each other the love of their lives. (Sinatra once said it was Ava who taught him how to sing a torch song.)
Gardner had smaller roles in film and TV into the ’70s and ’80s, with appearances in disaster films like Earthquake and the primetime soap opera Knots Landing. She died of pneumonia at age 67. She was buried in Sunset Memorial Park in Smithfield, N.C., next to her siblings and their parents. A floral arrangement from Sinatra at her graveside simply read: “With my love, Francis.”
Gardner is listed as the No. 25 Female Screen Legend by the American Film Institute. Not bad for the little girl from North Carolina with the big Southern drawl and megawatt smile.