Ava Gardner was discovered through a photo in a Fifth Avenue shop window
In 1940 a photographer brother-in-law put his portrait of an 18-year-old from rural North Carolina in his studio window. A clerk who liked pretending to be an MGM talent scout spotted it, and within a year Ava Gardner was on her way to Hollywood with a contract.
Gardner was born on Christmas Eve 1922 in Grabtown, the youngest of seven children of a farming family that lost its land during the Depression. Her father died of bronchitis when she was 15, and her mother kept the family going by running boarding houses. At school she wore hand-me-downs and was mocked for them, and she liked to go barefoot, a habit she later said helped persuade her to play The Barefoot Contessa.
The clerk, Barnard Duhan, worked for Loews, MGM's parent company, and used that link to chat up women. Rebuffed by the studio receptionist, he remarked that someone ought to send the picture to MGM, and her brother-in-law did. Al Altman, who ran the studio's New York talent office, filmed her walking and arranging flowers but skipped a voice test because he could barely follow her Southern accent. Louis B. Mayer supposedly wired back that she couldn't sing, act or talk and was terrific. MGM hired a speech coach.
Stardom took years. After a walk-on in 1942 and about fifteen more bit parts, her breakthrough came as the femme fatale Kitty Collins in The Killers in 1946, though she was still too nervous to eat in the studio commissary alongside Lana Turner. Mogambo earned her an Oscar nomination, and The Night of the Iguana, shot in black and white in Puerto Vallarta, brought Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. She could be sharply funny, calling John Ford the meanest man on earth and then adding that she adored him. When she lobbied for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, Mike Nichols chose the younger Anne Bancroft.
Her three marriages, to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, were all short. She used her influence to help Sinatra land his Oscar-winning part in From Here to Eternity, and the two stayed friends after divorcing. She moved to London in 1966, made her last appearance in a 1986 television film, and died in 1990 at 67. The American Film Institute later ranked her 25th among the greatest female screen legends.
Source: Ava Gardner
