Ava Gardner was born in 1922 in the small farming community of Brogden, Johnston County, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children (she had two brothers; Raymond and Melvin, and four sisters; Beatrice, Elsie Mae, Inez and Myra) of poor cotton and tobacco farmers; her mother, Molly, was a Baptist of Scots-Irish and English descent, while her father, Jonas Bailey Gardner, was a Catholic of Irish Read more...

In 1941, a Loews Theatres legal clerk, Barnard "Barney" Duhan, spotted Gardner's photo in the Tarr Photography Studio on 5th Avenue in New York. The photo had been taken in 1939 by the proprietor, Gardner's brother-in-law Larry Tarr, who was married to her older sister, Bappie (Beatrice). At the time, Duhan often posed as an MGM talent scout to meet girls, using the fact that MGM was a subsidiary Read more...

Gardner was nominated for an Academy Award for Mogambo (1953); however she lost to Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday. Many thought Gardner's finest performance was as Maxine Faulk in The Night of the Iguana (1964), for which she was not nominated. (Grayson Hall, as the repressed Judith Fellowes, however, was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category).

Other films include The Hucksters Read more...