30 of Ava Gardner's Most Sophisticated Style Moments

Ava Gardner, the dark-haired beauty known for her bold and sometimes brash demeanor, was born to a poor farming family in Grabtown, North Carolina, in 1922. She was the youngest of seven children, and during a visit to see her older sister, Beatrice, and her husband in New York City, Gardner was photographed by her brother-in-law, Larry Tarr. After displaying one of the 18-year-old's youthful portraits in his Fifth Avenue window, Gardner was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Gardner started her career after moving to Los Angeles, taking on mostly small roles that leaned more on her looks than her acting skills. After many lessons in poise and speech, she eventually started landing larger roles, and Gardner went on to act in more than 60 films, as well as television spots, throughout her career. Gardner, who was somewhat embarrassed by her lack of education, worked hard to have her legacy linked to more than her physical appearance. And while she is remembered for her roles in Mogambo, for which she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and The Night of the Iguana, which secured her a Golden Globe nomination, the alluring starlet is most certainly remembered for the many romantic encounters and marriages she left in her wake.

Three marriages—to Hollywood actor Mickey Rooney, the composer and big band leader Artie Shaw (who helped Gardner educate herself during their marriage with exposure to culture and by providing her reading lists), and singer-actor Frank Sinatra, with whom she had very public and dramatic fights and reconciliations—and many rumored love affairs (with the likes of Fidel Castro, Robert Mitchum, Spanish bullfighters, Howard Hughes, and John F. Kennedy, just to name a few) were the strokes of paint on the canvas of what her friend Arlene Dahl referred to as her "barefoot gypsy" life. Instances of wild behavior—like the evening she and Sinatra met at a Palm Springs party and drove to the small town of Indio, where they drunkenly shot out streetlights and store windows until they were picked up by the police—were also the coloring of her unpredictable journey.

And while Gardner lived a larger-than-life existence that is the stuff of movie scripts, she was always rooted in her rural upbringing and was said to be "rich and warm and human" by her co-star Deborah Kerr. An avid reader who kept her books alphabetized, Gardner hated having her beauty remarked upon, despite it being the reason she had her film career in the first place. And while that may have been the case, Gardner knew how to stop a room full of people in its tracks with her dark hair and eyes, titillating persona, and arresting sense of style.