Ads for The Barefoot Contessa (1954) called her "The World's Most Beautiful Animal," a tag that stuck with Gardner the rest of her life, even though she hated it. "The World's Most Beautiful Animal" was actually a tomboy from rural North Carolina with a Southern drawl so thick the director of her MGM screen test sent the results to Hollywood without sound. The test had been ordered after a legal clerk for Loew's, Inc., MGM's parent company, spotted her photo in the window of a photographer's shop. The photographer was living with Gardner's eldest sister and had been so impressed with the 19-year-old's beauty he thought her portrait would bring in customers. Ultimately, it brought Gardner an MGM contract. When studio head Louis B. Mayer saw the test, he wired, "She can't sing, she can't act, she can't talk, she's terrific." (Louis B. Mayer, quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography)
At first MGM did little with her, though they sent her to classes in acting, speech and anything else they thought needed fixing. She was best known for her photo shoots, which captured her beauty, and her marriages, first to studio superstar Mickey Rooney and then to jazz great Artie Shaw. Her screen roles were all unbilled bits. It took a loan-out to Monogram for her to achieve screen billing for the first time, in the Bowery Boys comedy Ghosts on the Loose (1943). Another loan out, this time to Universal for Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946), made her a star. Her role as a sultry gangster's moll was the first to capture her smoldering sensuality on screen. With that, MGM gave her the star build-up, teaming her with Clark Gable in The Hucksters (1947) and Robert Taylor in The Bribe (1949). By that time, her marriage to Shaw was over and she had embarked on a tempestuous affair with Frank Sinatra. He was still married to his first wife when the affair started, and gossip columnists blasted Gardner as a home-wrecker. The scandal ruined his career, but made her more popular than ever. They finally married in 1951, and the tempestuous relationship would continue to make headlines through their 1957 divorce.
She visited Spain for location shooting on the cult classic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and fell in love with the country. "I don't know if it was the climate, the men or the music," she said, "but as soon as I set foot in Spain, I had a crush on this country." After a string of profitable films including Show Boat (1951), Mogambo (1953), which brought her only Oscar® nomination, and The Barefoot Contessa, she left Hollywood to move to Spain full time.
Gardner had learned to dance flamenco for her role in The Barefoot Contessa and continued studying it, often staying up all night to dance and drink. She became friends with another American expatriate, writer Ernest Hemingway, who introduced her to bullfighting. Not only did she date bullfighters, including the legendary Louis Miguel Dominguin, but also she occasionally entered the ring herself, though not professionally. She continued working during her time in Spain, starring most notably in The Sun Also Rises (1957) and On the Beach (1959). She started moving into character roles with John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964), often hailed as her best performance.
Director Sergio Mondelo, who has produced documentaries on Salvador Dali and Pedro Almodovar, captures this period of her life in Ava Gardner, the Gypsy of Hollywood. For the documentary, he interviewed film critic and writer-director Jesus Garcia de Duenas, who knew Gardner during her time in Madrid, journalist and TV host Nieves Herrero, the author of As if there was no tomorrow: the passion of Ava Gardner and Luis Miguel Dominguin, actress Silvia Marso -- who appeared with Gardner in Harem (1986), a TV movie that marked her last work in Spain -- TV writer Frederic Martinez, who profiled Gardner and others in his Portraits d'Idoles, and actor Antoine Sire, author of Hollywood, the City of Women. The film is a co-production of Arte France, the French cultural network that also invested in Breaking Bad and Peaky Blinders, France's Mofo Films and Page 114, which produced You Were Never Really Here and BPM (both 2017).
In 1968, Gardner finally left Spain, hounded by scandals over her romantic affairs and dunned by the Spanish government for $1 million in taxes. She settled quietly in London, only leaving when she had to take an acting job to pay the bills. She still played occasional leads, as in the disaster film Earthquake (1974), on which she impressed director Mark Robson by insisting on doing her own stunts. But more and more, she was content to play supporting roles like Omar Sharif's mother in Mayerling (1968) or arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in Priest of Love (1981). She moved into television with the role of Nero's mother, Agrippina, in the miniseries A.D. (1985). She also guested on the popular prime-time soap Knot's Landing and returned to Spain for a cameo role in the tele-movie Harem (1986). After another tele-movie cameo in Maggie (1986), she suffered a pair of strokes, which left her too physically debilitated to work again. She suffered a bad fall in early 1990 and died a week later at the age of 67. Sinatra, who had helped her out financially in the past, paid for her funeral in North Carolina.
Director: Sergio Mondelo
Producer: Sophie Varillon
Cinematography: Jean-Louis Laforet
Cast: Ava Gardner (archive footage), Jesus Garcia de Duenas, Nieves Herrero, Silvia Marso, Frederic Martinez, Antoine Sire (Themselves)
By Frank Miller
