18 thoughts on “WCW: Ava Gardner

  1. Dat brooch in the 1972 photograph makes me smile as a jewelry geek. It looks very Edwardian.

    1. Funny, I didn’t notice the brooch, but I think it looks much more 40’s, rather than Nouveau. What I did notice was the dreadful mashup of a dress: part crocheted lace summer overdress c.1905, and part winterwalking suit. Terrible.

      1. How so? The bow motif with the lacy interior reads as Edwardian to me. The thinness of the metal is easier accomplished with platinum, popular with Edwardians, than the colored gold used in the Retro jewelry design period. Granted, this is a black and white photo, making it harder to confirm.

  2. I only have seen her in ‚Mayerling‘ and loved her in the role of the Empress. So elegant, beautiful and mysterious. But I have tobsay, she gave me the ‚WOW‘ factor in the pic from ‚my forbidden past‘.
    Seems like I need to watch a film solb

  3. I enjoyed her as the Duchess of Alba in Naked Maja and the baroness in 55 Days in Peking. She was also excellent in Showboat.

  4. Looks like she always did her own eye make up! She was utterly gorgeous, foul-mouthed and adventurous. She claimed that Sinatra was 119lb wet, but 19ib of that was cock.

    1. So it isn’t just my imagination that these diverse characters have the same eye makeup!

  5. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything. Being a Czech who grew up without TV (those are two unrelated characteristics), I’ve missed out on a lot of classic Hollywood – even though it’s still pretty much impossible to miss out on the names

    Unrelated: I left a bunch of comments on some old posts recommending stuff. To make matters clear, those aren’t in any way requests for you to review that stuff. In truth, I mostly left them there in case other readers come along and find it helpful, with a very mild hope that you might one day get around to it yourselves and actually enjoy it. I’m far from a regular reader, what with being unfamiliar with most of what you review anyway (see above), so that’s about it, really. :-)

    1. There’s a lovely small museum dedicated to Ava Gardner in Smithfield, NC, her home town. Chronicling her life from small-town country girl to screen goddess, it displays a number of her costumes and dresses (showcasing her impossibly small waist). She struggled with the contrast between her screen image and the reality of her earthy, often raunchy personality. It’s a wonderful way to spend a few hours and well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.

  6. Ava was the best thing in “Show Boat”; she even gets Kathryn Grayson to relax and enjoy herself a bit. (I, too, love that rather strange tartan-trimmed dress.) She plays her final scenes, when Julie has become an alcoholic fallen woman, in minimal make-up and contrives to look more beautiful than ever.

  7. Hey isn’t that Janet Suzman in the Priest of Love picture I believe I would recognize Alexandra anywhere

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