Friday quotes - Ava Gardner

"What I'd really like to say about stardom

is that it gave me everything I never wanted"

Ava Gardner

(1922-1990)

Ava Gardner in my opinion was the most beautiful of all the Hollywood stars.  Intelligent, feisty, hard drinking and one of the boys she was a force to be reckoned with.  Married three times to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and most famously to Frank Sinatra, she had high profile relationships Howard Hughes, Ernest Hemingway and a string of Hollywood legends, but Sinatra was always the love of her life.

I've been meaning to do a post about Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra for a long time but haven't yet found the time to do it justice.  Rather than quoting chunks of Wikipedia - here's an excerpt from Lee Server's fantastic biography.

Taken from Ava Gardner's Biography by Lee Server

"So here is how an evening out with Ava Gardner used to go.  You would arrive at her place in the Hollywood hills and she would be in the pool, naked, or slouching around the apartment, half dressed. Which guy were you?  Her 6 O'Clock or her 8 O’Clock?  Did you pass another guy on the way out by the potted palm?  Then you were her 8 O'Clock.  "Fix yourself a drink would you?"  She had to take a bath.  She would finally emerge, looking devastating, muttering something about having lost her diaphragm, and you would go to dinner; everyone would be looking and you would feel the luckiest guy on the planet.  Then you would go on to a club, do the rhumba, and get properly drunk; if you were unlucky Sinatra would track you down, and would appear out of nowhere and start screaming.  Then the evening would really get started.  What you did with yourself after that point was entirely up to you."

"Although no one believes me, I have always been a country girl and still have a country girl's values"

"After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled, "She can't talk!  She can't act!  She's sensational!"

"Because I was promoted as a sort of a siren and played all those sexy broads, people made the mistake of thinking I was like that off the screen.  They couldn't have been more wrong"

"I have only one rule in acting - 
trust the director and give him heart and soul"

"I made it as a star dressed,

and if it ain't dressed, I don't want it"

With David Niven

[On Australia]

"I couldn't imagine a better place for making a film on the end of the world"

"I haven't taken an overdose of sleeping pills and called my agent. I haven't been in jail, and I don't go running to the psychiatrist every two minutes.  That's something of an accomplishment these days"

"I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me.  Delightful, perfect"

With Mickey Rooney

With Artie Shaw

With Frank Sinatra

"I think the main reason my marriages failed 

is that I always loved too well, but never wisely"

"I suffered, I really suffered, with all three of my husbands.  And I tried damn hard with all three, starting each marriage certain that it was going to last until the end of my life.  Yet none of them lasted more than a year or two"

"All I ever got out of any of my marriages

was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst's couch"

With John Huston

"What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in"

"When I’m old and grey, I want to have a house by the sea.  And paint.  With a lot of wonderful chums, good music, and booze around. 
And a damn good kitchen to cook in"

"I must have seen more sunrises
than any other actress in the history of Hollywood"

"I wish to live until 150 years old, but the day I die,

I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand

and a glass of whiskey in the other"

Ava Gardner

(1922-1990)

More Friday quotes

Keith Richards

Marlene Dietrich
Joan Crawford

Frida Kahlo

Marilyn Monroe

Tallulah Bankhead

Diana Vreeland

Cher

Hedy Lamarr

Katharine Hepburn

Zsa Zsa Gabor

Joan Collins

The Actor and I are off to Norfolk for a few days to see my lovely dad and to visit a photographer friend on his farm that looks like something out of a Constable painting.  I'm hoping for lots of fresh air (I could certainly do with it!) and of course some fantastic country pubs.  We are constantly on a mission to find the "perfect" pub.  I shall report back with our findings.

Have a fabulous weekend xxx