Ava Gardner, Beautiful Hollywood Actress

Ava Gardner was a Hollywood legend and will always be remembered as one of the most beautiful actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age.

She was born in December, 1922, the seventh and youngest child of poor  farmers, but she went on to carve out a remarkably successful career for herself, and she became one of Hollywood's most stunning female movie actresses. She was married and divorced three times, each time to one of Hollywood's top stars of the time: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra.

Ava originally started in Hollywood when she was discovered by a local photographer who arranged an invitation for an interview at MGM almost entirely on the basis of her astonishing good looks. She passed the test with flying colors and she moved to Hollywood in 1941, where she kept busy learning her new trade for five years in 'B' movie parts, in everything from unbilled walk on roles to romantic leads in the well known East Side Kids movies. She first made a real impact as a perfect Kitty Collins, the film noir temptress of 'The Killers' in 1946, when her charms left Burt Lancaster so shell-shocked that he is unable to defend himself when attacked by killers.

This success didn't get her any interesting work very quickly but it certainly got her noticed by the critics and the media. She was cast for her goddess-like beauty in 'One touch of Venus' in 1948 and then her voice was dubbed in the unreal environment of 'Show Boat' in 1951. In 'Pandora and the Flying Dutchman' in the same year she played her most competent and fully developed part in her career to date, as a scheming temptress who drives men to ruin but also pines to join her lover, played by James Mason, in the hereafter.

Gardner was absolutely stunning in in 'The Barefoot Contessa' in 1954 playing a star supposedly modeled on Rita Hayworth but in it she is able to express her own personal problems and insecurities. That she had a great acting talent is beyond doubet and her ability shone brightly when she worked with a top director, as with John Ford in 'Mogambo' in 1953 and George Cukor in 'Bhowani Junction' in 1956. After her much publicised divorce from Sinatra, from which he never fully recovered, she transferred to Spain, and most of her later films were made away from Hollywood. Her perspiring, decaying and decadent beauty fits well into 'The Sun Also Rises' in 1957, 'On the Beach' in 1959, and 'The Night of the Iguana' in 1964. She was wonderfully like a leader of a coven in the little-seen 'Tam Lin' in 1979, and she also gamely shows up in Earthquake' in 1974 and 'The Cassandra Crossing' in 1976.

In 1968 Gardner moved to London and spent her final years almost as a recluse. She suffered a stroke in 1989 that left her bedridden, and her third husband Sinatra paid all her medical expenses. In 1990, shortly after completing her autobiography, she passed way, aged 67, of bronchial pneumonia.

Many film fans still feel that Ava Gardner was the most beautiful actress ever seen in Hollywood.