Best Movies, Biography of a Beautiful Actress .. Ava Gardner

15.Show Boat

Ava Gardner, Kathryn Grayson

Released: 1951

Directed by: George Sidney

Ava Gardner – a woman of the golden age

is an apt and oft-used description for Gardner’s screen persona, a quality acquired in part during her rural upbringing. The daughter of a poor tobacco farmer, Gardner was something of a tomboy and gave no thought to an acting career until age 18, when M G-Mayer talent scouts spotted portraits of her in the window of her brother-in-law’s New York City photography studio. She was given a screen test, in which her lack of refinement and barely intelligible thick drawl prompted MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer to proclaim, “She can’t act. She can’t talk. She’s terrific. Sign her.” Heavily coached in acting, poise, and elocution by the studio, Gardner appeared mostly in decorative bit parts during the first four years of her screen career. Her big break came when the studio loaned her to Universal Pictures for the film noir classic The Killers 1946 in which Gardner played a duplicitous seductress opposite screen newcomer Burt Lancaster. She was subsequently cast in better roles at MGM where she was promoted as “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal” and at other studios in such films as The Hucksters 1947 One Touch of Venus 1948 Show Boat 1951, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro 1952.

Gardner’s skill as an actress was best revealed in films she made for such top directors as George Cukor, John Ford, and Joseph L. mankiewicz. I have only one rule in acting,” she once said, “trust the director and give him heart and soul.” Gardner’s gutsy, hard-boiled characterization opposite Clark Gable in Ford’s mogambo—highlighted by a memorable and hilarious scene in which she tries to feed a baby elephant and a baby rhinoceros—earned for the actress her only Academy Award nomination. Many feel mankiewicz’s The Barefoot contessa, in which she costarred with Humphrey Bogart, to be the definitive Gardner film, in that the rags-to-riches story roughly parallels Gardner’s own life. Although a lesser film than either of the aforementioned, cukor’s bhowan i Junction 1956 features Gardner in what may be her most praised screen performance, as a half-caste Anglo-Indian heroine torn between two cultures and multiple lovers.
The Sun Also Rises 1957, On the Beach 1959, Seven Days in May 1964 and The Night of the Iguana (1964) are among the best of Gardner’s subsequent films. Although she remained active until the late 1980 s, she had difficulty landing roles as she aged and, by her own admission, many of her later films were done “for the loot.”
The Sun Also Rises 1957, On the Beach 1959, Seven Days in May 1964, and The Night of the Iguana 1964 are among the best of Gardner’s subsequent films. Although she remained active until the late 1980 s, she had difficulty landing roles as she aged and, by her own admission, many of her later films were done “for the loot.

Gardner endured tempestuous, well-publicized marriages to actor Mickey Rooney (1942–43) and bandleader Artie Shaw (1945–46); her marriage to singer-actor Frank Sinatra (1951–57), a relationship characterized by passion and jealousy in equal measure, was one of the most storied Hollywood romances of the century. Many, including Gardner herself, felt that she never had the screen career her talents deserved; as one critic explained it, “Her looks made that inevitable.”

Ava is the most popular actor in the male audience of the film in the golden age of Hollywood.

December 24, 1922 U.S.  –  January 25, 1990 England. UK.

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