“Ava Gardner used to be known as the most beautiful woman in the world (and was once fancifully publicized as the World’s Most Beautiful Animal), but it was not wholly her looks that made her one of the great movie stars. Her image, which she quickly developed, was that of the independent-minded, worldly-wise and sexually knowledgeable good bad woman who fascinates men and worries wives. She was eminently suitable to be a Hemingway heroine, as she proved in The Sun Also Rises and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and her highly publicized off-screen life was built into her screen personality. Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa appears almost autobiographical (sensual, temperamental beauty built to stardom) and certainly he never considered anybody else for the part. Her marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, like her friendships with Howard Hughes and others, are all a part of her cinema legend; she is the epitome of the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has made it big without kowtowing to anybody.”
/ From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979) by Ken Wlaschin /
Born on this day: tempestuous smoky-eyed screen goddess extraordinaire Ava Gardner (24 December 1922 – 25 January 1990). For anyone interested: the definitive biography is Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing (2006) by the late, great Lee Server (who also wrote the definitive biography of Gardner’s erstwhile lover Robert Mitchum). Pictured: portrait of Gardner by John Engstead.
