Ava Gardner

She 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 was the woman who drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide, and haunted him to the end of his life. Ernest Hemingway carried around one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento. Howard Hughes begged her to marry him; but she punched out his front teeth instead. Her charismatic presence, jaw-dropping beauty and fabulous, scandalous adventures fuelled the legend that Ava Gardner became.

Ava Gardner ranks among the great legendary figures in Hollywood history, one of an elite few screen stars whose actual life was as outsized and colourful as a movie poster. Hers is the story of a barefoot farmgirl from North Carolina who became a Hollywood goddess. It was a life of hedonism and self-destruction across a spectacular canvas: big studio Hollywood in the '40s and '50s, the birth of film noir, MGM musicals, exotic locations from Pakistan to Tanganyika, the Las Vegas of Frank Sinatra, the Madrid of studly bullfighters and Argentine dictators, and finally to the garden square in Knightsbridge where she retreated from the world's gaze for the last years of her life.

Exhaustively researched, written with great style and a vivid sense of time and place, Ava Gardner is filled with fresh insights gleaned from exclusive interviews with Ava's colleagues, close friends and lovers. By the author of the acclaimed biography Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care, this is the definitive biography of Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star.