Ī Loews Theatres legal clerk, Barnard Duhan, spotted Gardner's portrait in Tarr's studio. He was so pleased with the results that he displayed the finished product in the front window of his Tarr Photography Studio on Fifth Avenue.
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Gardner was visiting her sister Beatrice in New York City in the summer of 1940, when Beatrice's husband Larry Tarr, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait as a gift for her mother Molly. She then attended secretarial classes at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson for about a year. Ava attended high school in Rock Ridge and she graduated from there in 1939. After her father's death, the family moved to Rock Ridge near Wilson, North Carolina, where Molly ran another boarding house for teachers. While in Newport News, Jonas became ill and died from bronchitis in 1938, when Ava was 15 years old. In 1931, the teachers’ school closed, forcing the family to finally give up on their property dreams and they moved to a larger city, Newport News, Virginia, where Molly found work managing a boarding house for the city's many shipworkers. While the children were still young, the Gardners lost their property, and Molly received an offer to work as a cook and housekeeper at a dormitory for teachers at the nearby Brogden School that included board for the family and where Jonas continued sharecropping tobacco and supplemented the dwindling work with odd jobs at sawmills. She was raised in the Baptist faith of her mother. She was of English and Scots-Irish and ancestry. Her parents, Mary Elizabeth "Molly" ( née Baker 1883–1943) and Jonas Bailey Gardner (1878–1938), were poor tobacco sharecroppers. She had two older brothers, Raymond and Melvin, and four older sisters, Beatrice, Elsie Mae, Inez and Myra. Īva Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922, in Grabtown, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children. 25 on their greatest female screen legends of classic American cinema list. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Gardner No. She continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death in 1990, at the age of 67.
(1966), Mayerling (1968), Tam-Lin (1970), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Earthquake (1974) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). She continued her film career for three more decades, appearing in the films 55 Days at Peking (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), The Bible: In the Beginning. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in John Ford's Mogambo (1953), and for best actress for both a Golden Globe Award and BAFTA Award for her performance in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964).ĭuring the 1950s, Gardner established herself as a leading lady and one of the era's top stars with films like Show Boat, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (both 1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956) and On the Beach (1959). She first signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew critics' attention in 1946 with her performance in Robert Siodmak's film noir The Killers. Mogambo (1953) cast with (L-R) Donald Sinden, Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, Denis O'Dea, Gardner and Eric PohlmannĪva Lavinia Gardner (Decem– January 25, 1990) was an American actress.