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For a few years, Ava Gardner obtained a bottle of champagne yearly on her birthday from Princess Grace of Monaco. “She by no means forgot, and yearly at Christmas she despatched a handwritten card,” wrote Ava of Grace Kelly in her memoir, Ava: My Story. “She was an excellent girl, and in addition nice enjoyable.”
Hollywood is full of tales of costars who couldn’t tolerate one another offscreen, however Ava and Grace, who met whereas filming 1953’s Mogambo, shared one of many Golden Age’s sweetest friendships. “They wrote letters and would ship items to one another,” Dean Sidden, a board member on the Ava Gardner Museum, tells Nearer. “They remained shut buddies whatever the physical distance between them.”
In the event that they hadn’t each been standard actresses, it’s probably that Ava and Grace would by no means have met. Ava, who was born in 1922, grew up in North Carolina. The kid of farmers, she spent her summers barefoot, climbing timber and working with the boys. Grace, in the meantime, was born right into a distinguished Philadelphia household. Regardless of her dad and mom’ objections, she studied theater on the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and landed in Hollywood round 1950.
Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner Have been Kindred Spirits
Director John Ford seen Grace in considered one of her early movies and solid her in Mogambo, a remake of 1932’s Crimson Mud. Clark Gable reprised his function from the unique, this time caught in a love triangle between Grace and Ava moderately than Mary Astor and Jean Harlow.
“As a substitute of being shot on the Metro again lot, it was really going to be photographed the place it was presupposed to happen,” recalled Ava, who joined her costars on location in Kenya, Uganda and a number of other different African international locations.
It wasn’t a straightforward shoot. An rebellion led the manufacturing to rent armed guards to guard the solid and crew in Kenya. The places had been additionally topic to overwhelming warmth, torrential rain, mudslides and poor roads. “It’s scorching as it may be through the day,” Grace wrote to a good friend. “Was within the solar rather a lot right this moment and my poor nostril is sort of a purple mild.”
Frank Sinatra made the journey to visit his bride Ava on the set. Romantic sparks additionally flew between Grace and Clark, however probably the most enduring relationship could be between Ava and Grace. “I keep in mind on Gracie’s birthday we obtained a bottle of champagne from some bootlegger, and he or she and Clark and [director John] Ford and I had just a little get together out within the tent. Later, we did the identical factor for mine,” recalled Ava, who confided that Grace “was by no means a lot of a drinker, although she tried laborious.”
Ava stored a watch on Grace, particularly when she left to be sick after imbibing an excessive amount of. “I’d go off and discover her and convey her again earlier than the lions ate her,” she recalled.
Grace’s romance with Clark didn’t proceed past Mogambo’s wrap get together, however her friendship with Ava would final till her loss of life in a 1982 automobile accident. “To be a good friend of Ava you needed to be ferociously loyal,” says Invoice Turnage, a board member of the Ava Gardner Museum. “Ava was devastated to lose her.”
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