Ava Gardner was one of the most glamorous and famous stars in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Her list of films includes The Killers, Showboat and Mogambo, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress, and her co-stars included Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Charlton Heston, and Richard Burton - the A-list of male Hollywood stars. Married three times - to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra - the first two lasted only about a year each whilst her marriage to Sinatra lasted several. She had a long-running affair with Howard Hughes, and a briefer one with George C. Scott, among others. In Ava Gardner, she has much to say about her husbands and lovers, and some of her co-stars,all of whom get Gardner's unflinchingly honest treatment. Ava Gardner is irresistibly candid and surprising. She began the book because, as she told Evans, 'it's either write the book or sell the jewels and I'm kinda fond of the jewels.' At the time of their collaboration Gardner was living in London, where she had lived for decades, smoking and drinking heavily. Having suffered a stroke that damaged the left side of her face and her left arm she had trouble sleeping and was often depressed - the glamorous wardrobes replaced by grey. Her story could itself have been depressing except for her wit and wickedness, which are on full display in this book. This book tells the story of her life as she wanted to tell it. Ava Gardner is the autobiography that Ava Gardner began with writer Peter Evans in 1988. She never finished it and decided against publishing it because of its frankness. She later collaborated on a tamer autobiography, which was published at her death in 1990. After Gardner's death, her estate authorised the book to be published much as she and Evans had originally conceived it.

"The most complete and engrossing biography yet of this exotic Southern girl...Excellent."—Liz Smith She was the sex symbol who dazzled all the other sex symbols. She was the temptress who drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide and haunted him to the end of his life. Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento, and Howard Hughes begged her to marry him—but she knocked out his front teeth instead. She was one of the great icons in Hollywood history—star of The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa, and The Night of the Iguana—and one of the few whose actual life was grander and more colorful than any movie. Her jaw-dropping beauty, charismatic presence, and fabulous, scandalous adventures fueled the legend of Ava Gardner—Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star. In this acclaimed first full biography of Gardner, Lee Server recreates—with great style and vivid detail—the actress's life, from her beginnings as a barefoot North Carolina farm girl to her heady days as a Hollywood goddess. He paints the full spectacle of her tumultuous private life—including her string of failed marriages to Mickey Rooney, Sinatra and Artie Shaw—and Gardner's lifelong search for adventure and love. Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing" is both an exceptional work of biography and a richly entertaining read.

Renowned for her screen performances, down-to-earth personality, and love affair with Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner left an indelible mark on Hollywood history. Her adventurous life story is told through authoritative text and hundreds of photos in Ava: A Life in Movies. Ava is an illustrated tribute to a legendary life. Authors Kendra Bean and Anthony Uzarowski take a closer look at the Academy Award-nominated actress's life and famous screen roles. They also shed new light on the creation and maintenance of her glamorous image, her marriages, and friendships with famous figures such as Ernest Hemingway, John Huston, and Tennessee Williams. From the backwoods of Grabtown, North Carolina to the bullfighting rings of Spain, from the MGM backlot to the Rome of La Dolce Vita, this lavishly illustrated biography takes readers on the exciting journey of a life lived to the fullest and through four decades of film history with an iconic star.

A self-portrait of the late film legend's golden-era Hollywood life traces her impoverished childhood in North Carolina through the heights of her career, sharing details of her relationships with such figures as Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, and George C. Scott.

Ava Lavinia Gardner, born on December 24th, 1922, Grabtown, North Carolina, U.S., was an actress and singer. Ava was signed to a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during 1941, having appeared mainly in small roles until she attracted attention with her performance in The Killers (1946), opposite Burt Lancaster. Gardner was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Mogambo (1953), having also received BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for other roles.

Following his superb biography of Robert Mitchum, "Baby I Don't Care," Server turns to the life of movie icon Ava Gardner. Her rise to fame was a Cinderella story, to be sure, but Server gives readers the unexpurgated version in this no-holds-barred view of a larger-than-life star.

Many books have been written about the fascinating public and private life of Ava Gardner, one of the most famous and beautiful film stars of all time-but none can compare to this one by Mearene "Rene" Jordan. While some biographers had to rely on second-hand knowledge and newspaper and magazine articles that were often unreliable or deliberately inaccurate, Jordan (whose nickname is pronounced "Reenie") was on the scene for countless real-life Gardner episodes that rivaled any fiction. It is a must-read for classic movie enthusiasts and also for those who need a reminder of what true friendship is.

This remarkably illuminating portrait of Tennessee Williams lifts the veil on the heart and soul of his artistic inspiration: the unspoken collaboration between playwright and actor. At a low moment in Williams’s life, he summoned to New Orleans a young twenty-year-old writer, James Grissom, who had written him a letter asking for advice. After a long, intense conversation, Williams sent Grissom on a journey on his behalf to find out if he or his work had mattered to those who had so deeply mattered to him. Among the more than seventy women and men with whom Grissom talked were giants of American theater and film: Lillian Gish, (“the escort who brought me to Blanche”), Jessica Tandy (the original Blanche DuBois on Broadway), Eva Le Gallienne (“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper”), Maureen Stapleton, Julie Harris, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, and many more. Follies of God provides dazzling insight into how Williams conjured the dramatic characters and plays that so transformed American theater.

Doris Rollins Cannon, founder and chairman emeritus of the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, has used her unparalleled knowledge to give us our first glimpse into the life of a woman whose movie career spanned 44 years and 61 movies. Never before has the childhood of Ava Gardner been explored as it is in Cannon's book. Ms. Cannon has spent more than 20 years interviewing the people who knew Ava in childhood, including family members, teachers, friends, and neighbors.This is the first book that accurately portrays the early years of this world-renowned star. Other books that have appeared are mainly collections of hearsay. As a former newspaper writer and editor, Ms. Cannon finds the fascinating truth about Gardner's years as a Grabtown Girl.Born in Grabtown, North Carolina, Ava Gardner went from the rural sandhills of eastern North Carolina to become the star of such films as Night of the Iguana, The Sun Also Rises, Showboat, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and The Barefoot Contessa. The youngest of five daughters born to Jonas and Mary Elizabeth Gardner, her relationship with her elder sister Bappie was crucial to her success as a film star. Grabtown Girl shows us Ava as a child, playing with her siblings in the boardinghouses that her parents ran.The Ava Gardner Museum houses one of the world's largest collections of memorabilia dedicated to a film star. Since the early eighties, the museum has attracted thousands who have fallen under the hypnotic charm of Ava Gardner.