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1 | Underwent two abortions during her marriage to Frank Sinatra. |
2 | She and Gregory Walcott both came from the same hometown. |
3 | When he was married to her, Artie Shaw paid tribute to her home town by making an instrumental record with his Gramercy Five (a small group within his big band) called "The Grabtown Grapple.". |
4 | Louis B. Mayer once said of her, "She can't talk, she can't act, she's terrific". |
5 | Aunt of Billy Grimes. |
6 | Charlton Heston revealed that Gardner behaved badly during the troubled shoot of 55 Days at Peking (1963) in his autobiography "In the Arena". For example, she stopped the filming when a Chinese extra took her picture without permission. Heston also stated that her character was killed off to keep the producers and director from having to deal with her anymore. |
7 | London neighbor and close friend of Charles Gray. |
8 | She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960. |
9 | She underwent a hysterectomy in 1968 from worries about contracting uterine cancer, the disease that had taken her mother's life. |
10 | She and Robert Taylor had a brief love affair during the filming of The Bribe (1949). |
11 | Frank Sinatra bought her a puppy for her birthday during their courtship, a Corgi she named Rags. For the rest of her life she always had a Corgi with her. After Rags died, she had Cara and then Morgan. |
12 | When her first husband, Mickey Rooney, brought his hugely successful musical "Sugar Babies" to London in the late 1980s, Gardner confessed to him that she had contemplated suicide after being left partially paralyzed by two strokes in 1986. |
13 | She suffered from a severe case of emphysema in her later life, and she could not travel far without an oxygen tank for breathing. |
14 | In Italy, most of her films were dubbed by Rosetta Calavetta. She was occasionally dubbed by Dhia Cristiani, Lidia Simoneschi and Andreina Pagnani. |
15 | Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 319-321. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999. |
16 | Ava's paternal great-grandparents, William Gardner and Cynthia Eliza Batts, were also the paternal great-great-great-great-grandparents of actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead. This makes Ava and Mary Elizbaeth second cousins, three times removed. |
17 | Her The Angel Wore Red (1960) co-star Dirk Bogarde nicknamed her "Snowdrop" because, he said, anything less likely was difficult to imagine. |
18 | Her three husbands were eventually married to a total of 20 brides between them. |
19 | The production designer John Hawkesworth, an Englishman who was the set designer of her movie Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), said about Gardner that she "could eat twice as much as anyone, and drink three times as much.". |
20 | An Australian reporter found that Gardner was quite adept at foul language, and her swearing was "like a sailor and a truck driver were having a competition." She threw a glass of champagne at the reporter, who said that at the moment she did so "the only thing I could think was how bloody gorgeous the woman was.". |
21 | While living in Spain, became a good friend of the writer Ernest Hemingway, whom she and his other friends called "Papa". Both of then were fans of bullfighting. |
22 | During her final years living in London, she became the dinner companion of director Michael Winner. |
23 | Had appeared in three films based on Ernest Hemingway stories: The Sun Also Rises (1957), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Killers (1946). |
24 | Frank Sinatra nicknamed her "Angel". |
25 | Is portrayed by Deborah Kara Unger in The Rat Pack (1998), by Christine Andreas in Love and Betrayal: The Mia Farrow Story (1995), Jon Mack in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), and by Kate Beckinsale in The Aviator (2004). |
26 | Although she often gave the name of her North Carolina hometown as Grabtown, and at other times as Smithfield, the township is a crossroads community named Brogden. "Grabtown" is a nickname given to it by locals. Smithfield is a larger town seven miles west. |
27 | Chosen by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest American female screen legends (Number 25). |
28 | Once named "The World's Most Beautiful Animal" (in a 1950s publicity campaign). |
29 | Part of On the Beach (1959) was filmed in Berwick, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Ava had a street - on that was being developed at the time - named for her. Its name is "Gardner Street". |
30 | During the first two years of her marriage to Frank Sinatra, he was at the lowest point of his career. She often had to lend him money so he could buy presents for his children. He went broke in 1951, and Gardner had to pay for plane tickets for him so that he could go with her to Africa, where she was shooting Mogambo (1953). This all changed after he won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in the film From Here to Eternity (1953). |
31 | A statue of her from The Barefoot Contessa (1954) was given to Frank Sinatra as a gift. He kept it in his backyard garden well after their divorce. When he married Barbara Marx, she forced him to get rid of it. |
32 | When shooting Earthquake (1974), she surprised director Mark Robson by insisting that she do her own stuntwork, which included dodging blocks of concrete and heavy steel pipes. |
33 | Was a good friend of Kathryn Grayson and Lena Horne, despite the fact that Ava and Lena both competed for the part of Julie LaVerne in Show Boat (1951). |
34 | Ex-daughter-in-law of Joe Yule (Mickey Rooney's father). |
35 | Once met J.R.R. Tolkien and neither knew why the other was famous. |
36 | After her death in 1990, Ava's longtime housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, and her dog, a Welsh Corgi named Morgan, were taken in by her former co-star Gregory Peck. |
37 | She spent her final years as a recluse in her London apartment -- her only companions were her longtime housekeeper Carmen Vargas and her beloved Welsh Corgi, Morgan. Two strokes in 1986 left her partially paralyzed and bedridden. Although Gardner could easily afford her medical expenses, Frank Sinatra wanted to pay for her to visit a specialist in the United States, and she allowed him to make the arrangements for a medically-staffed private plane. Her last words (to her housekeeper Carmen), were, "I'm so tired", before she died of pneumonia at age 67. Vargas took her body home to her native North Carolina for private burial. None of her ex-husbands attended. |
38 | There is an Ava Gardner Museum of memorabilia in Smithfield, North Carolina. |
39 | She was continuously under contract at MGM, 1941-1958. |
40 | In a promotion for The Little Hut (1957), a small island in Fiji was renamed Ava Ava and leased to a contest winner. |
41 | Flamenco became one of Ava's favorite pastimes after she learned it for The Barefoot Contessa (1954); increasingly proficient and needing little sleep, she often danced all night. |
42 | She sang in her own voice for The Killers (1946) but in all MGM films her singing voice was dubbed (much to her disgust). |
43 | Her early education was sketchy; by 1945, she had read two books, the Bible and "Gone with the Wind." In later life, she more than made up for this lack by continual self-education. |
44 | The youngest of 7 children. Her older siblings were Raymond, Melvin ("Jack"), Beatrice ("Bappie"), Elsie Mae, Inez, and Myra. |
45 | She was the daughter of Mary Elizabeth (Baker) and Jonas Bailey Gardner. Her father was a tobacco farmer who died of bronchitis in 1935. Ava had British/English ancestry. She is sometimes cited as having had Native American ancestry, but this ancestry has never been verified/documented. |
46 | Her singing voice in Show Boat (1951) was dubbed by Annette Warren, although her voice is left in on the soundtrack album. |
47 | Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#68). [1995] |
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