American actress Ava Gardner
Credit: Sunset Boulevard
‘I’m so f tired of being Ava Gardner,” said Ava Gardner, shortly before her death in 1990. It’s not hard to appreciate her fatigue. For decades the tabloids had been following and encouraging her rambunctiousness: Ava Gardner Drunk on Arrival at Hotel. Ava Gardner Smashes Up Hotel Suite. Ava Gardner Hurls Champagne Glass at Hotel Manager. It was all in a day’s work for the star to scuffle with photographers, their cameras crashing to the pavement. Nor were co-stars and suitors immune from her flying fists. She once hit Shelley Winters with a bottle. Howard Hughes was knocked unconscious with a brass ashtray. Gardner met her pugilistic match, however, with George C Scott. He beat her up at the Savoy, followed her to Rome and beat her up again, and their final bout was in Hollywood. “I’d be lying there next to him, black-and-blue and bleeding… There was so much blood,” she remembered, almost wistfully.