"After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled, 'She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!'" ~ Ava Gardner
Once voted the most beautiful woman in the world, sensational film star Ava Lavinia Gardner (1922-1990) was born Ava Lavinia Gardner in Grabtown, North Carolina, the seventh child of poor cotton farmers.
"Although no one believes me, I have always been a country girl, and still have a country girl's values," explained the green-eyed Garner who throughout her life loved running around in her bare feet.
Gardner was an unforgettable contradiction: the good-bad girl. Ravishingly beautiful, she was surprisingly shy, yet spoke her mind with colorful boldness. "Love is nothing but a pain," she once said.
The product of Hollywood's studio star system, she made her film debut in We Were Dancing (1942) and caught worldwide attention with her femme fatale performance in The Killers (w/Burt Lancaster, 1946). "It never dawned on me that I wasn't going to be a smash right away," she said.
Portraying an earthy combination of sensuality and glamour, she starred in Show Boat (1951), The Barefoot Contessa (w/Humphrey Bogart, 1953) and her only Oscar-nominated role in Mogambo (w/ John Ford, 1953).
By the time she met the love of her life, Frank Sinatra in 1950, Gardner had already married and divorced actor Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw. She never remarried after her divorce from Sinatra in 1957.
"One thing I've always known is that the process of growing up, growing old, and growing toward death has never seemed frightening," she wrote in her autobiography My Story. "If I had my life to live over again, I'd live it exactly the same way."
You are sensational, just the way you are!