Ava Lavinia Gardner was an American actress and one of the great Hollywood film stars. She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time. Gardner was born in the small farming community of Brogden, Johnston, North Carolina, the youngest of seven children of poor tobacco farmers.
Soon after her arrival in Los Angeles, she met Mickey Rooney, and was married at the age of 19 on January 10, 1942 in Ballard, California. Her second marriage was to Artie Shaw from 1945 to 1946 and it was even more disastrous than the first, and it was during this marriage that Gardner began to drink and take refuge in therapy. The third and last was to Frank Sinatra from 1951 to 1957. She divorced Sinatra in 1957 and headed to Spain where her friendship with Ernest Hemingway led to her becoming a fan of bullfighting, and bullfighters.
She moved to London in 1968, undergoing a hysterectomy to allay her worries of contracting the uterine cancer that had killed her mother. After a stroke in 1989, which left her partially paralyzed and bedridden, Frank Sinatra paid her $50,000 medical expenses. Her last words were 'I'm tired' to her housekeeper Carmen. She died of pneumonia in London, England at the age of 67 in 1990.
