Ava Gardner #1

[Festat]

I so love the last one.

 

[scriptgirl]

Glad you both like it.

meredy

 

[crow_watcher]

^Wouldn't have imagined Ava striking a pose like that on the floor. Nevertheless, she looks divine.

Great pic, script!

 

[scriptgirl]

Glad you appreciate the pic!

ebay

 

[Festat]

Geez, is she dancing macarena or something?
Love the pic! ♥

 

[scriptgirl]

Glad you like it. Looks like the charleston, since "The Sun Also Rises" is set in the 20s

ebay

 

[scriptgirl]

Britannica.com
Miranda Wilding - December 24th, 2008

Ava Gardner (b. Christmas Eve 1922 in Smithfield, North Carolina - died January 25, 1990 in London, England) was one of the most extraordinary film stars of the 20th century.
Ava wasn’t just incredibly beautiful. She was the kind of complicated, utterly fascinating woman that comes along once in a very great while.
She was provocative in the most dangerous sense of the word. Ava wore her smoldering sensuality on her sleeve. She was a rebellious, green eyed Irish girl who was sophisticated and free spirited. If she had been born several decades later, she may never have married at all. No man ever owned her. She was too strong and much too independent.
Beneath all of that fire and music, there was a savage intelligence, a wicked wit and an unbreakable will. She knocked Howard Hughes out cold one night when he started slapping her around. She beat her second husband (musician Artie Shaw) at chess. He never forgave her.
Ava started out as a contract player at MGM. Despite her distracting loveliness, inwardly she was very much a small town southern girl and felt out of her depth with Hollywood’s fast crowd. She was a quick study. Ava was a notorious night owl. She discovered that she enjoyed parties and socializing.
She found her soulmate with her third husband, Frank Sinatra. That romance was legendary. But their passionate, stormy, hotblooded relationship was too intense to last. Though he remarried twice after that, she always remained the one true love of his life.
In 1946, Ava played the femme fatale Kitty Collins opposite Burt Lancaster in The Killers. That was the beginning of a landmark career. She went on to do the 50s version of Show Boat and then Mogambo, for which she received her only Academy Award nomination. Her most famous role was the tragic Spanish movie goddess that she portrayed in The Barefoot Contessa (1954).
She worked steadily throughout her life and eventually left the U.S. entirely. Ava fled to Spain and then to London, where she lived out her final years.
She was a fashion icon in the sense that she was widely admired by other women, who emulated the glamorous styles of her characters.
Ava loved the best of everything: Creed’s perfume, Dior gowns and Ferragamo shoes.

 

[scriptgirl]

Todos

 

[scriptgirl]

Design.taxi
The Ava Gardner Museum plans the second annual Ava Fest 2006, for Sept. 29 - Oct 1, with festivities starting at 10am - 5pm on Saturday, and 1pm-5pm on Sunday. The Museum has again received a loan of costumes from actress/singer Debbie Reynolds of four "Mogambo" costumes belonging to Gardner, Grace Kelly and Clark Gable.

The Ava Gardner Museum announced that Ava Gardner Fest 2006 will be held on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 2006. Ava Gardner Fest is a celebration of the life of legendary film actress Ava Gardner and a showcase for creative arts from her beloved birthplace. The festival, which features free films, live jazz, art and fine crafts, is conveniently located in historic Downtown Smithfield along the I-95 and I-40 corridor in eastern North Carolina.

"Ava Gardner was passionate about the arts. Her inner circle of friends included some of the World's best-known artists, poets, writers and musicians," said Angela Lawson, Executive Director of the Ava Gardner Museum. "By featuring regional artists and musicians this festival honors Ava's passion for creative arts and her affection for her North Carolina heritage."

Ava Gardner Fest 2006 will include a special exhibit featuring costumes from the award winning film "Mogambo." The costumes -- worn by Gardner, Grace Kelly and Clark Gable -- are part of the $50 million dollar collection owned by actress Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds' collection of more than 3,500 costumes and motion picture artifacts is the largest private collection of Hollywood memorabilia in the world.

 

[scriptgirl]

Movie Posters at the Ava Gardner Museum

webshots

 

[scriptgirl]

Film Monthly
Ava Gardner possessed such luminescent beauty that both sexes experienced a sharp intake of breath and weak knees when seeing her for the first time.
As the ultimate movie love goddess, no film, movie, photograph or publicist’s adjectives could ever do Ava justice. Her life of volcanic excess proved to be similarly elusive until Lee Server’s Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing.
Server, who perfectly captured Robert Mitchum’s laconic laissez-faire in Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care, follows with another captivating chronicle of one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars.
“Love is nothing but a pain…” said Ava, concluding the sentence with an exact anatomical locale. For Gardner, love and pain became a swirling, kamikaze-like froth of high-speed existence before decades of overload finally broke her down.
A literal “Tobacco Road” refugee from Grabtown, North Carolina, Ava’s beauty was instantly recognized in a quickie MGM screen test, and she was signed to a long term contract. Stardom was not instantaneous. The legendary studio’s overstocked production line moved at a glacial pace, and Ava’s southern brogue and total lack of acting experience required considerable polish.
After six years of small parts and loan-outs in dreck such as Ghosts on the Loose (1943) with Bela Lugosi, it finally took Mark Hellinger casting her in Universal’s The Killers (1946) to make her a star.
“It was sex-two-and extra,” wisecracked the fast-talking Hellinger when asked why he chose Ava for the starring role. Gardner’s striking performance as a lethal femme fatale who double-crosses Burt Lancaster remains a seminal screen performance. After The Killers, Gardner never had to glance backwards for stardom, but many of her subsequent films didn’t do her justice.
She shined in several pictures, including Show Boat (1951), Mogambo (1953) and The Barefoot Contessa (1954), when her beauty wasn’t used to hype poorly designed material. Gardner lacked confidence, and acting was always a chore. Only craftsmen directors like John Ford and Joe Mankiewicz were able to bring out her considerable talent.
It is Ava Gardner’s publicly private life that is presented in mesmerizing fashion by Server.
She was a virginal teenager at MGM, until bending to the incessant blandishments of that diminutive superstar and Hollywood sharpie, Mickey Rooney. After a whirlwind honeymoon on Rooney’s terms at Pebble Beach, “…sex and golf and sex and golf,” Gardner’s high octane jealousy was piqued Mickey’s incessant philandering. She moved on to charismatic bandleader Artie Shaw, who quickly became as coldly demeaning as he was with his other seven wives. Ava became more case-hardened, yet increasingly vulnerable, looking for love in all the right and wrong places.
Ava’s craving for sex, booze and wild times quickly rose to tsunami heights, and the wave failed to crest for many years. Although she held off an ardent Howard Hughes, Gardner was forever restless, fearing loneliness over all else. No matter how bored or free of spirit, though, no other relationship in the star’s life rivaled her thermonuclear marriage to Frank Sinatra.
The seismic pairing of both rags-to-riches superstars that pegged the Richter scale of destructive passion became the centerpiece of Gardner’s life. Ava and Frank’s unbridled desire for one another was as unchecked as their inability to coexist without screaming invective and hurled bric-a-brac. Yet it was a love that endured like a flame of pure fire.
If all of this sounds like a prurient show business gossip biography, it isn’t.
Gardner’s life is depicted in an upbeat, attuned style. Polemics and titillation are refreshingly absent from a mesmerizing story supported by superb research. Server fondly brings Gardner to life as a warm, refreshingly unpretentious star whose appetites eventually overwhelmed her spirit.
Whether defining amnesia as “noir’s version of the common cold” or recalling Mark Hellinger placing a censor’s letter about The Killers script in a file labeled”**** You,” the author’s ability to imbue cinematic history within the narrative is peerless.
In the end, a desiccated Gardner iteratively listens to Sinatra’s records in her London flat as her health fails. The poignancy of Ava Gardner’s destructive quest for love will bring a lump to your throat.
Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothing is a compelling triumph of a biography.

 

[scriptgirl]

Ava Portrait

webshots

 

[scriptgirl]

Ava's NYT obit
Ava Gardner, a North Carolina sharecropper's daughter who became one of the most bewitching movie actresses in the world, died of pneumonia yesterday at her home in the Kensington section of London. She was 67 years old.
The star's death was announced by Paul Mills, a longtime friend and film producer, who said she had been ill for some time, particularly with respiratory problems, and had a stroke more than three years ago.
The actress had lived quietly in London for more than 30 year after being hounded for decades by photographers and reporters who publicized her marriages to Mickey Rooney, the band leader Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra and her flamboyant escapades with matadors, international playboys and writers.
Working on Her Memoirs
Miss Gardner, who had been completing her memoirs, said in a recent interview, ''If you don't tell your side, the self-appointed biographers step in, adding to the abysmal lies.''
The actress, whose green eyes, chestnut hair, high cheekbones and sensual lips made her eminently photogenic, was known for femme fatale portrayals.
She brought a tigresslike seductiveness and a husky-voiced irreverence to roles as worldly, devil-may-care women, becoming adept at playing exotic vamps and free-spirited protagonists, as in films of such Ernest Hemingway stories as ''The Killers'' (1946), ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro'' (1952) and ''The Sun Also Rises'' (1957). In the loosely autobiographical ''Barefoot Contessa'' (1954), she played a fiery dancer who becomes a movie star.
Praise for Later Roles
She portrayed torch singers in ''The Hucksters'' (1947) and ''Show Boat'' (1951); an irrepressible playgirl in ''Mogambo'' (a 1953 role for which she won an Academy Award nomination); a tormented Anglo-Indian in ''Bhowani Junction'' (1956); a thoughtful cosmopolitan in ''On the Beach'' (1959), and a blowsy innkeeper in the film of Tennessee Williams's ''Night of the Iguana'' (1964).
Although she was mainly decorative in most of her early roles and many reviewers said her acting range was narrow, she won wide praise for many later performances. Nonetheless, she consistently denigrated her talent, remarking to a 1985 interviewer: ''Listen, honey, I was never really an actress. None of us kids who came from M-G-M were. We were just good to look at.''
Poverty in Childhood
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Dec. 24, 1922, in Grabton, a poor community outside Smithfield, N.C., to Jonas Bailey Gardner, a tobacco and cotton farmer, and Mary Elizabeth Gardner. Her father died when she was 16, and her mother then managed a boardinghouse.
Her childhood was marked by poverty and a wardrobe so meager it prompted ridicule from schoolmates. She took commercial courses in high school, and an older brother paid her tuition so she could continue secretarial studies for a year at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson, N.C.
At 18, she visited her eldest sister, Beatrice, in New York City, on a journey that transformed her life. Her brother-in-law, Larry Tarr, a commercial photographer, took a portfolio of pictures of her and sent them to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was given a screen test in New York that was made without sound because of her heavy Southern drawl. The 1941 test won her a seven-year M-G-M contract and intensive diction lessons as well as a starlet's standard classes in acting, calisthenics, makeup and fashion.
Her next five years were notable for tiny roles in a score of mostly forgettable movies, a blizzard of publicity pictures - and two brief marriages, to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw. Each marriage ended in separation after less than a year and finally in divorce.
The 69-year-old Mr. Rooney, upon learning of her death, said yesterday, ''My heart is broken with the loss of my first love.''
Stardom at 24
Miss Gardner later attributed the brevity of the first marriage to the couple's youth and to other people's domination of their lives. A press agent invariably accompanied them, even on their honeymoon. Of the second marriage, Miss Gardner said, Mr. Shaw insisted she read scores of books and insulted her intelligence in public.
Despite the personal setbacks, Miss Gardner won stardom at the age of 24 as a gun moll who betrays her lover (Burt Lancaster in his film debut) in ''The Killers.'' Other early starring roles were in a musical, ''One Touch of Venus'' (1948); a melodrama, ''The Great Sinner'' (1949), and a fantasy, ''Pandora and the Flying Dutchman'' (1951).
Miss Gardner's third marriage, to Frank Sinatra in 1951, was one of the most publicized Hollywood unions of the time. The couple had bitter public quarrels and separated in 1953 but tried a series of brief cross-country, trans-Atlantic reconciliations. They were finally divorced in 1957.
In a 1986 book, ''His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra,'' Kitty Kelley attributed the following quotation to the actress:
''You start with love, or what you think is love, and then comes the work. I guess you have to be mature and grown up to know how to work at it. But I was the youngest of seven kids and was always treated like the baby, and I liked it and played the baby. Now I'm having a helluva time growing up.''
On TV as Nero's Mother
In 1958 Miss Gardner left M-G-M and became an independent actress, earning up to $400,000 a movie, most of them made in Europe. Her films included ''55 Days at Peking'' (1963), ''Seven Days in May'' (1964), ''Mayerling'' (1969), ''The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean'' (1972), ''The Blue Bird'' (1976) and a handful of disaster epics.
She did not appear on television until 1985, portraying Agrippina, Nero's scheming mother, in ''A.D.,'' a lavish mini-series about the first Christian century, and reviewers hailed her as still very much a star. Asked about her reluctance to accept television roles, she replied: ''Television is a lovely thing for people of my age to watch, but it's for young people to make. The kids were very nice to me.''
In the 1950's, the actress was deeply in love with Spain, bullfighting and, reportedly, a succession of bullfighters.
Her celebrated candor made her friends and enemies. When she arrived in Australia to make ''On the Beach,'' she enraged many people by remarking, ''I'm here to make a film about the end of the world, and this sure is the place for it.''
Sympathetic interviewers described her as an outgoing, earthy woman who had a lively sense of humor, particularly about herself, and deep family loyalty. Looking ahead to retirement, Miss Gardner once remarked: ''When I'm old and gray, I want to have a house by the sea. And paint. With a lot of wonderful chums, good music and booze around. And a damn good kitchen to cook in.''
Survivors include two sisters, Beatrice, of Hollywood, and Myra, of Smithfield, N.C., and nieces and nephews.
At her wish, she is to be buried beside her parents in North Carolina.

 

[scriptgirl]

Big Australia and RTL Presse

 

[jackie_oh]

Stunning face! Pure fierceness!

 

[scriptgirl]

all star pictures

 

[nmyngan]

kobal collection

 

[scriptgirl]

gasoline alley

 

[nmyngan]

rus de archives

 

[scriptgirl]

ebay