Ava Gardner was the sex symbol who dazzled the other sex symbols. Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner thought her the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. She drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide. Ernest Hemingway carried around one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento. Howard Hughes begged her to marry him: she punched out his front teeth. Her charismatic presence, jaw-dropping beauty and scandalous adventures fuelled the legend that she became. Yet she was a farmgirl who became a reluctant goddess, and who retreated from the world's gaze for the last years of her life. Filled with fresh insights gleaned from interviews with Ava's colleagues, friends and lovers, this is the definitive biography of Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star.

Reissued as part of the Bloomsbury Lives of Women series, this edition coincides with the 20th anniversary of her death on 25th January 1990

About the Author
Lee Server is a writer, biographer, and chronicler of popular culture and author of the highly acclaimed biography Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care. His latest biography, Ava Gardner, was published by Bloomsbury in April 2006.

Reviews
'An extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman ... Gardner's genius was not her work, but, as this book proves, her life' Observer 'Server gets movie stars, and he gets movies ... That's quite a trick for a biographer to pull off - both to immerse himself in his subjects, yet make them utterly his own' Sunday Times



Book Information
ISBN 9781408807088
Author Lee Server
Format Paperback
Page Count 560
Imprint Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 34mm