Ava Gardner by Nickolas Muray, Modern Screen, 1952

Ava Gardner (1922–1990), American film actress of the 1940s and ’50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. “Earthy femininity” is an apt and oft-used description for Gardner’s screen persona, a quality acquired in part during her rural upbringing. The daughter of a poor tobacco farmer, Gardner was something of a tomboy and gave no thought to an acting career until age 18, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts spotted portraits of her in the window of her brother-in-law’s New York City photography studio. She was given a screen test, in which her lack of refinement and barely intelligible thick drawl prompted MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer to proclaim, “She can’t act. She can’t talk. She’s terrific. Sign her.” Heavily coached in acting, poise, and elocution by the studio, Gardner appeared mostly in decorative bit parts during the first four years of her screen career. Her big break came when the studio loaned her to Universal Pictures for the film noir classic The Killers (1946), in which Gardner played a duplicitous seductress opposite screen newcomer Burt Lancaster. She was subsequently cast in better roles at MGM—where she was promoted as “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal”—and at other studios in such films as The Hucksters (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), Show Boat (1951), and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952).