Currently reading the amazing biography of Ava Gardner by Lee Server, titled “Love Is Nothing”. In her world full of heartbreak, rejection, glamour and lust, Ava became known as one of the most mysterious, beautiful and erotic film noir actresses in Hollywood. The biography is full of details of her failed marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, her affairs with men like Howard Hughes, her slow ascent to stardom and her country upbringing in rural North Carolina. It is definitely a good read.

“She was who she was: Ava Gardner. Actress, love goddess. Resident of London, Madrid, Hollywood, and Grabtown. She liked jazz and driving too fast and nights that went on forever. She loved gin and dogs and four-letter words and Frank Sinatra. Once upon a time she was thought to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She had luminescent white skin, eyes like Andean emeralds, eminent cheekbones, a wide, sensuous mouth, a sleek, strong body that moved with a feline insolence and a dancer’s grace. She played temptresses, adventurers, restless women, in the movies and in private life. On the silver screen she conveyed a powerful image of dark desirability. To see her in flesh was said to have made the blood race, the hair on the arms stand up. To know her more intimately was to surrender to mad passions, to risk all. “I’m a plain simple girl off the farm,” she liked to say, “and I’ve never pretended to be anything else.”