Star profile

"Tired of being Ava Gardner": What happened to the star after she left America for Madrid and London

Ava Gardner did not collapse in Hollywood. She walked away, lived her last 35 years abroad, had a stroke in 1986 and died of pneumonia in her London flat in 1990, after asking her ghostwriter to see her out.

Trailer screenshot, Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

Ava Gardner never looked like a woman who needed Hollywood’s approval, which is a neat trick for a sharecropper’s daughter who became an MGM starlet at 18 and then married Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra in turn. Yet what happened to her was no studio-town collapse but a long walk away: she lived her last 35 years outside the United States, suffered a stroke in 1986, and died of pneumonia after a long illness in her London flat on January 25, 1990, a month past her 67th birthday.

The company at the end says a good deal. Jess S. Morgan, trustee of her living trust, wrote in the afterword to her memoir, Ava: My Story, that her long-time housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, was with her, along with a Welsh Corgi also called Morgan. Three husbands, decades of headlines, and the last witnesses were a housekeeper and a dog.

The walking away began in earnest in November 1953, when she was leaving Sinatra. James Kaplan, in Frank: The Voice, puts her at Idlewild on the steps of a Rome-bound flight, in big sunglasses, holding a Barefoot Contessa script she had not got around to reading and waving the hand that no longer wore a wedding ring. She filed for divorce in June 1954 and moved to Madrid in 1955, though the divorce itself took until 1957 to settle.

Fame simply traveled with her. Tony Trabert, the American tennis star who met her on a flight to Australia, remembered photographers in Melbourne hiding behind trees and shooting from passing cars. “She could never have any peace,” he said in Lee Server’s biography, Love Is Nothing, and he judged that the hounding turned her reclusive.

The big parts thinned out on their own schedule. Her last major leading role came in The Night of the Iguana, with Gardner running a crumbling hotel in the jungle and keeping two beachboys as playthings. In 1966 she telephoned Mike Nichols about playing Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, and Nichols, who never seriously considered her, later recalled her at a little French desk in her hotel announcing her terms: “I strip for nobody.”

She moved to London that same year. That year she also had an elective hysterectomy, out of worry about the uterine cancer that had killed her mother. She ended up at 34 Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, her final address, and acted regularly until 1986, when the television film Maggie became her last appearance. That was also the year of the stroke. She could afford her own doctors, but Sinatra wanted to pay for a specialist in the United States, and she let him arrange a medically staffed private plane. The papers had her in and out of hospital in the years that followed.

Then came the book, the one thing she had always vowed never to write. She put the choice to Peter Evans as writing it or selling her jewels, and Evans, who wondered how much she could still remember after the stroke, or would admit to, rang her Knightsbridge neighbor Jack Cardiff, the cinematographer who had known her for 40 years. Cardiff told him that if Gardner wanted him for the job, he would end up doing it.

The hardest moment in Evans’s account, The Secret Conversations, has nothing to do with lovers. She told him she was “so fucking tired of being Ava Gardner,” and said that when she was done she wanted no retakes, laughing that one take was a thing her whole career had never managed. When the time came, she asked, would he take her to the people at Exit, hold her hand and be there when she went? He knew exactly what she was asking. “I won’t help you die, Ava,” he told her, and her answer was “I thought you were my friend.” Evans wrote that she despised cowardice and disloyalty, and that she made him feel guilty of both.

The friendship cooled over something else entirely: she learned that Sinatra had once sued Evans and the BBC, and Evans left the project. She worked on her autobiography for more than two years, filling some 90 tapes and finishing the last a few months before she died. Those tapes, not Evans’s pages, became her own memoir: Alan Burgess and Kenneth Turan shaped them into Ava: My Story, which appeared eight months after her death. Evans’s notes and draft waited far longer, coming out as The Secret Conversations only after he died in 2012.

She went home in the end. As she had expressly stipulated, she was buried on January 29 in the Gardner family plot in Smithfield, North Carolina, among her parents and siblings. Gregory Peck, her friend and three-time co-star, took in both the housekeeper and the dog.

The marriage she flew away from that November has its own reckoning: why Ava Gardner left Frank Sinatra in 1953, just as his comeback began.

Quick answers

What happened to Ava Gardner?

Ava Gardner left the United States, living in Madrid from 1955 and London from 1966. She had a stroke in 1986, made her last appearance that year in the television film Maggie, and died of pneumonia in London on January 25, 1990, at 67.

How did Ava Gardner die?

Ava Gardner died of pneumonia after a long illness, in her Ennismore Gardens flat in London on January 25, 1990. She had suffered a stroke in 1986. Her housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, and her Welsh Corgi were with her.

Why did Ava Gardner divorce frank sinatra?

Ava Gardner divorced Frank Sinatra at the end of a turbulent marriage full of well-publicized fights. They announced their separation through MGM on October 29, 1953, she filed in June 1954 while dating the matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, and the divorce was settled in 1957. They stayed friends.

Where did Ava Gardner live in london?

Ava Gardner lived at 34 Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, London. She moved to London from Madrid in 1966, and the flat was her final residence when she died there in 1990.