Ava was born in 1922, and her early years were very different from the life of the Hollywood princess she would become.

She grew up with six brothers and sisters on a farm, and her family was not wealthy. 

Gardner didn’t set out to become an actor; she fell into it by chance.

When she was 18, she moved to New York City and was photographed by her brother-in-law, a professional photographer. He put her picture up in his studio, and a few people who saw it asked who she was.

The company then offered her a screen test, and she went to New York for it.

Despite shaky acting skills, she was contracted with MGM in 1941.

At the same time that Ava Gardner’s career at MGM started, Mickey Rooney became one of America’s most famous actors.

Rooney’s drinking became a problem, and Gardner later said how mean he could be when he was drunk.

Ava Gardner’s marriage to Mickey Rooney did not last very long. They got married in 1942 and divorced in 1943.

She received $25,000 in the divorce settlement, paid her legal bills, and was glad to leave the marriage.

Sadly, her mother died on the same day she finalized her divorce from Rooney.

Many famous men had tried to date Ava Gardner, but few were as crucial as Howard Hughes.

The problem was that Shaw was married when he and Gardner started their relationship. But he left his wife for Gardner, and the two married in 1945.

However, her marriage to Shaw was problematic, just like her previous one.

When Ava Gardner married Mickey Rooney, she started drinking.

This marked the end of Gardner’s second marriage and Shaw’s sixth.

However, she received her big break when director Robert Siodmak saw her and decided she’d be ideal for the femme fatale role in his noir picture The Killers.

The newspapers wrote about her, saying she had been separated twice before. She rarely went out and spent most of her nights alone at home.

Gardner was paid $140,000 to star in this musical. This allowed her to show everyone how good she was at singing. 

When Ava Gardner first met Frank Sinatra, she was a young actress trying to make it big.

The divorce process took a long time, but in 1951, Sinatra’s divorce from his wife was finalized. Just ten days later, he and Gardner got married.

Gardner became pregnant twice while she was married to Sinatra, and both times, she had to have an abortion.

One memorable scene in Mogambo is when the baby elephant pushes Gardner, who lands in a mud puddle.

Gardner was nominated for an Oscar but lost her husband.

They split up in 1953 after only two years of marriage, but it took many years for their divorce to be finalized.

If you don’t like Rooney, Shaw, Sinatra, Hughes, and Gable, add Ernest Hemingway to the mix. They became close friends when she and Sinatra broke up.

As she got older, she started to have health problems. In 1968, she had an operation to remove her womb (hysterectomy) because she was worried she might get cancer of the womb like her mother had. But she didn’t know that she would have a lot of other health problems. She smoked a lot, had lupus, and caught pneumonia. Things got worse in 1986 when she had a stroke that left her disabled.

Gardner was in a bad place after her stroke, and she even admitted to Mickey Rooney that she was thinking about suicide.

Ava Gardner lived a whole life, but near the end, she said she had some regrets.

“I am sad I spent 25 years making films. “I wish I had the most important things to a woman: a good marriage, children, and a better education,” she said.

She is buried in Sunset Memorial Park next to her parents and siblings. In the same town, the Ava Gardner Museum opened in 1996.