AVA GARDNER

On the 30th anniversary of her death, the actor isn’t only remembered for her on-screen seductiveness, but for her ability to drink as heavily, swear as often and enjoy as many lovers as Hollywood’s most notorious men.

- Amy Nelmes Bissett

In the photography studio on New York’s 5th Avenue, an 18-year-old Ava Gardner picks up a wide-brimmed hat, places it over her chestnut hair and ties it neatly beneath her chin, hoping to mimic Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She then sits upon a wooden stool and smiles self-consciously as her brother-in-law, professional photographer Larry Tarr, takes frame after frame.

The photoshoot was intended as a bit of fun during her first trip away from her home state, North Carolina. But when that portrait was propped in the window of Tarr’s gallery, truly capturing Gardner’s bewitching beauty, it would change the trajectory of her life forever.

Her once modest aspirations of completing secretarial school, getting a nice, steady job and marrying a reliable man in her rural hometown would soon be swapped for a seven-year movie contract that would transform Gardner into the most captivating femme fatale that Hollywood has ever known, even to this day.

She would enchant and thrill in equal measure, in everything from The Killers (1946) and Mogambo (1953) to The Night of the Iguana (1964), with the smitten great-grandson of Charles Darwin even describing her as the “highest specimen of the human species”. And he was hardly alone in his adoration.

But Gardner’s life off-screen is what stood her apart from most of her female contemporaries at the time. She counted Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway and [actor] Clark Gable among her lovers. She enjoyed a stiff drink, no matter what time of day. And most of all, she feared no-one and was renowned for verbally sparring with Hollywood’s most powerful men, from fellow actors to studio heads. “She was a queen with the soul of a peasant,” actor Roddy McDowall once said.