“What’s the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.” – Ava Gardner.

Ava Gardner Biography

When Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on 24 December 1922, her family were cotton and tobacco farmers in Smithfield, North Carolina. Mary Elizabeth, who everyone knew as Mollie and Jonas Bailey Gardner had seven children with, two boys, and five girls, with Ava being the youngest. Jonas and Mollie were poor, to begin with, but they lost their property when the children were all still quite young and so had to look for alternative income. Jonas found work in a sawmill and Mollie found work at a dormitory for school teachers as a housekeeper.

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The income wasn’t nearly enough though and the Gardners decided that they might have better luck in a larger city and so headed off to Newport News in Virginia to look for better work when Ava was about seven years old. Mollie found work running a boarding house for ship workers and things were ok for a while, but about seven years later, Jonas contracted bronchitis and unfortunately died.

Following her husband’s death, Mollie moved the family to Rock Ridge in North Carolina where once again, Mollie found work running a boarding house, this time for teachers.

After Ava Gardner graduated from the high school in Rock Ridge, she attended Atlantic Christian College, with a view to becoming a secretary, but this was to last for only about a year because of what happened next.

In 1941, Ava visited her sister, Beatrice, who had by now married a professional photographer called Larry Tarr and was living in New York. During her visit, Larry decided he would like to take a portrait photograph of Ava. The results were so good, that he displayed the portrait in the window of his studio on Fifth Avenue.

The portrait was spotted by Barnard Duhan, who worked for Loews Theatres, the owners of MGM Studios. Duhan was in the habit of pretending to be a talent scout for MGM in order to meet girls and so tried to get more information about the girl in the picture but was turned away by Larry Tarr’s secretary. However, as he was leaving he made an off the cuff remark about someone needing to get the girl to MGM.

This sounded like a great idea to Beatrice and Larry and they contacted the studio. Soon after, Ava traveled back to New York again to meet with Al Altman, who was head of the talent department at MGM’s New York office. He arranged for a camera to record Ava whilst he directed her with some simple tasks. He made no effort to record her voice as her deep Southern drawl made it all but impossible for Altman to understand her. As a result of the test MGM studios gave Ava Gardner a contract and in 1941 she left school and headed off to Los Angeles. The first thing she did when she arrived was a attend lessons with a speaking coach.

Shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles, she met Mickey Rooney and the pair fell for each other and decided to get married. The studio wasn’t that happy about it though as Rooney, another MGM contract actor was appearing in a popular series of movies as Andy Hardy and they thought that if it got out that he was married his popularity, and therefore that of the movies would suffer. Consequently, the studio arranged a venue for the wedding in the middle of nowhere, in a town called Ballard in California. The couple was married on 10 January 1942, but the studio needn’t have worried. Less than a year later, they were divorced, with the main cause being Rooney’s string of affairs.

Ava would marry again in 1945, this time to a bandleader called Artie Shaw. He had previously been married to Lana Turner, but this marriage too failed and the couple was divorced in 1946. Also during the 1940’s she had an on-off relationship with the reclusive Howard Hughes who she described a...