Hollywood Remembers Ava Gardener
Once voted the world's most beautiful woman, Ava Gardner was born in 1922, one of six children of a tenant farmer and had a sad, lonely childhood. She planned to be a secretary but found Hollywood knocking at her door when a family photograph wound its way onto the desk of an MGM casting agent.
Packaged as a replacement for Rita Hayworth, she was first hailed as a star alongside other newcomer Burt Lancaster after their appearance in the film noir classic The Killers in 1946. She appeared in Showboat in 1951 and won acclaim with an Oscar nomination for Mogambo (1952), opposite Clark Gable.
