Ava Gardner

The Fifty-Dollar Contract

Ava Gardner was born on a tobacco plantation in Grabtown in 1922. She was the youngest of seven siblings, and her future seemed tied to the red clay of North Carolina. But a photo in the window of a New York photography studio changed everything overnight.

An MGM talent scout saw that portrait, and the rest was pure bureaucratic momentum.

In 1941 she arrived in Hollywood with no acting experience and a thick Southern accent that nobody could understand. The studio executives were blunt after seeing her screen tests. They said she couldn't talk and couldn't act, but that she was the most beautiful animal in the world.

She spent five years in tiny roles and posing for advertising photos. That period of forced apprenticeship ended in 1946 with the release of The Killers. She played Kitty Collins, and her screen magnetism made it clear the studio had a gold mine on its hands.

The constant escape to Madrid

In the early 50s, her personal life began to consume her career. Her marriage to Frank Sinatra turned into a televised war of attrition that left her exhausted. So she decided to put some distance between herself and Hollywood and settled in Spain.

Madrid was her private refuge for more than a decade.

She lived at the Castellana Hilton hotel and later in a villa in La Moraleja, where parties ended at dawn. In 1954 she filmed The Barefoot Contessa, and fiction blended with her real life of flamenco dances and late nights at the Chicote bar. She surrounded herself with bullfighters like Luis Miguel Dominguín and writers like Ernest Hemingway, while Hollywood kept courting her for major productions.

But the studio system was suffocating her. In 1953 she starred in Mogambo alongside Clark Gable and Grace Kelly in a grueling shoot in Africa. That role earned her her only Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

She never won an Oscar.

In 1964 she gave one of her finest performances in The Night of the Iguana under John Huston's direction. The shoot in Mexico was a media circus, but she managed to give a bitter humanity to her character, Maxine Faulk. It was one of the few times critics forgot about her looks and focused on her talent.

The Silence of London

In the late 60s she decided to move to London, seeking a calm that Spain no longer gave her. Years of excess with alcohol and tobacco began to take a toll on her health and appearance. She appeared in films such as The Cassandra Crossing in 1976 to help pay the bills of a lifestyle that remained expensive.

In 1986 she suffered two strokes that left her partially paralyzed.

She spent her final years in seclusion at her Ennismore Gardens home, with only her housekeeper and her dog for company. In 1990 she published her memoir, Ava: My Story, in which she settled scores with her ex-husbands and with the industry that had treated her like a luxury object. She died of pneumonia on January 25 of that same year.

Her body was taken back to Smithfield and buried at Sunset Memorial Park beside her parents. None of her three official husbands attended the funeral. Frank Sinatra quietly covered all the costs of the transfer and burial through her lawyers.