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FILM
AVA GARDNER
The orthodox assessment of Ava Gardner is that she was an undistinguished actress who happened to be a great beauty. This does not do justice to her acting. It does not do justice to her beauty either!
Ava was never given the type of roles that bestow respectability upon an actress; nor did she appear in films that win awards and critical admiration. Ava worked in the salt mines of the movie industry; in melodramas, historical romances and safari movies, in crime films and westerns: movies that film critics affect to despise. However, although film critics were reluctant to show enthusiasm for Ava or her movies, cinema-goers had no such inhibitions.
She was born Ava Lavinia Gardner in Grabtown, North Carolina in 1922 into a large family of very modest circumstances, and grew up happily, without ambitions or pretensions, in a very straight-laced environment.
An older sister had married a New York photographer who took some pictures of Ava when she visited them in 1941. He deposited the photos with the New York office of MGM who were so impressed that they invited Ava to make a screen test. MGM were delighted with the results of Ava's test but alarmed by her North Carolina accent, and sent a silent print to Hollywood. MGM Hollywood took one look at the test and instructed their East Coast office to send Ava out to California.
http://www.lovegoddess.info/Ava.htm
In 1941, a Loews Theatres legal clerk, Barnard "Barney" Duhan, spotted Gardner's photo in Tarr's studio. At the time, Duhan often posed as an MGM talent scout to meet girls, using the fact that MGM was a subsidiary of Loews. Duhan entered Tarr's and tried to get Gardner's number, but was rebuffed by the receptionist. Duhan made the offhand comment, "Somebody should send her info to MGM", and the Tarrs did so immediately. Shortly after, Gardner, who at the time was a student at Atlantic Christian College, traveled to New York to be interviewed at MGM's New York office. She was offered a standard contract by MGM, and left school for Hollywood in 1941 with her sister Bappie accompanying her. MGM's first order of business was to provide her a voice coach, as her Carolina drawl was nearly incomprehensible.[1]
Oscar nomination
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 (1947), Showboat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), 1954's The Barefoot Contessa (which some consider to be her "signature film" which mirrored her real life custom of going barefoot), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Sun Also Rises in which she played party-girl Brett Ashley, 1957), and the film version of Neville Shute's best-selling On the Beach, co-starring Gregory Peck.
"Off-camera, she gave off sparks of wit, as in her assessment of John Ford, who directed her in Mogambo: 'The meanest man on earth. Thoroughly evil. Adored him!'"[2]
MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ava_Gardner
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