GRACE KELLY & AVA GARDNER - Inside Their UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP

For many years, Ava Gardner received a bottle of champagne every year on her birthday from Princess Grace of Monaco.

- Lindsay Hoffman

“She never forgot, and every year at Christmas she sent a handwritten card,” wrote Ava of Grace Kelly in her memoir, Ava: My Story. “She was a great lady, and also great fun.”

Hollywood is filled with stories of costars who couldn’t tolerate each other offscreen, but Ava and Grace, who met while filming 1953’s Mogambo, shared one of the Golden Age’s sweetest friendships. “They wrote letters and would send gifts to each other,” Dean Sidden, a board member at the Ava Gardner Museum, tells Closer. “They remained close friends regardless of the physical distance between them.”