Blue plaque spotlight: Ava Gardner (1922-1990)

WHO?

Leading lady of Hollywood’s Golden Age

WHERE?

34 Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge

Ava Gardner spent her youth far from the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown. She grew up a country girl in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children whose parents were poor tobacco sharecroppers.

But in 1941, her brother-in-law, Larry Tarr, took a photograph that would make hers the kind of life that belonged, as they say, in the movies. Tarr placed her portrait in the window of his photography shop on Fifth Avenue. Spotting it, passer-by Bernard Duhan tried to get Gardner’s number by pretending to be a talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. He suggested more photos be forwarded to the company, which Tarr proceeded to do. Gardner returned to the Big Apple for a screen test with MGM’s talent department, which was headed by Al Altman, to whom her thick Southern accent verged on being unintelligible. Afterwards, Louis B Mayer, head of MGM, sent over the telegram: ‘She can’t sing. She can’t act. She can’t talk. She’s terrific!’

MGM tried to change everything about Gardner except her beauty, which made the starlet feel like an impostor. She even had lessons with a speech coach to change her accent. For much of her career, which comprised appearances in almost 70 films, she considered herself talentless. This self-doubt would linger at the back of her mind even when she was later nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Mogambo (1953), and then for a Golden Globe and Bafta for her role in John Huston’s The Night of the Iguana (1964).

Her insecurities were exacerbated by a series of high-profile but dysfunctional relationships that began with her marriage to actor Mickey Rooney, in which he constantly partied, gambled and womanised. While many actresses tolerated the patriarchal nature of Hollywood, Gardner would not put up with a cheating husband regardless of his fame. As their divorce took place, her mother died, and during this depressing period she turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism.

By the end of the 1940s, Gardner had begun seeing Frank Sinatra. Lee Server’s biography Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing recounts the story of the pair drunk-driving to Indio, California in 1949, where they began shooting out street lights and windows before being arrested.

The press lampooned her as a homewrecker when her affair with Ol’ Blue Eyes became public knowledge, but Sinatra left his wife for Gardner anyway, marrying her in 1951. However, their union was poisoned by jealousy on both sides. In 1953, Gardner helped Sinatra land an Oscar-winning, career-salvaging role in From Here to Eternity, but not long after, she filed for divorce.

When she travelled to Rome to film The Barefoot Contessa (1954), it seemed Europe might offer some respite from her hectic life. She moved to Spain in 1955, where she had filmed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman a few years earlier. Here, she enjoyed the late-night dive bars and dancing alongside flamenco dancers.

Bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin, with whom she had a brief dalliance, introduced her to Ernest Hemingway, whose favourite adaptation of his work had been The Killers (1946), starring Gardner. As enchanted by the starlet as the next man, Hemingway not only helped her get cast in the 1957 adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, but apparently kept a kidney stone she passed and instructed the staff at his villa not to clean out the pool water after she had swum in it naked.

Gardner left Spain for a quieter life in London in 1968. She acted less and less until stopping altogether in 1986. She bought her first-floor flat at 34 Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge in 1972, where she would spend her final 18 years with her housekeeper and her Welsh corgis, enjoying cultural pastimes such as going to the ballet and theatre – and her local pub, the Ennismore Arms. She enjoyed the relative anonymity of life in London and was apparently a much-loved resident of the square who looked out for her neighbours. She referred to the apartment as her ‘little London retreat’, gushing over the ‘history and grandeur’ of the 18th-century building. ‘Some say it is too big for me alone, but I love the space.’

Gardner summoned the writer Peter Evans to her Knightsbridge address, and he would later turn their discussions into the biography Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations (2013), which was packed with revelations, including her identification of Sinatra as her one true love. Gardner died at her London residence on 25 January 1990. Sinatra sent a floral display to her funeral, along with a note of his undying love.