She first signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew critics' attention in 1946 with her performance in Robert Siodmak's film noir The Killers.

During the 1950s, Gardner established herself as a leading lady and one of the era's top stars with films like Show Boat, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (both 1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Mogambo (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956) and On the Beach (1959).

When Gardner was born, by community standards, they were “better than well-to-do” with her father having the deed to their tobacco and cotton farm, and owning a sawmill and a country store.

[8] In 1931, the teachers' school closed, forcing the family to finally give up on their property dreams and move to Newport News, Virginia, where Gardner's mother found work managing a boarding house for the city's many shipworkers.

After her father's death, the family moved to Rock Ridge near Wilson, North Carolina, where Gardner's mother ran another boarding house for teachers.

[9] Gardner was visiting her sister in New York City in the summer of 1940 when her brother-in-law, a professional photographer, offered to take her portrait as a gift for her mother.

[9] Barnard Duhan, a legal clerk at Loews Theatres, spotted Gardner's portrait in her brother-in-law's studio.

MGM's first order of business was to provide her with a speech coach because her Carolina drawl was nearly incomprehensible to them,[12] and Harriet Lee as her singing teacher.

[14] After five years of bit parts, mostly at MGM and many of them uncredited, Gardner came to prominence in the Mark Hellinger production The Killers (1946), playing the femme fatale Kitty Collins.

“Ava wouldn’t even go eat in the commissary because she was so scared to walk in and see Lana Turner and Greer Garson,” says actress Arlene Dahl.

[4] Films from the next decade or so include The Hucksters (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Lone Star (1952), Mogambo, nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Sun Also Rises (1957) and On the Beach (1959).

Off-camera, she could be witty and pithy, as in her assessment of director John Ford, who directed Mogambo ("The meanest man on earth.

[16] Gardner played the role of Guinevere in Knights of the Round Table (1953), with actor Robert Taylor as Sir Lancelot.

Gardner played the role of Soledad in The Angel Wore Red (1960) with Dirk Bogarde as the male lead.

John Huston directed the movie in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, insisting on making the film in black-and-white – a decision he later regretted because of the vivid colors of the flora.

She next appeared again with Burt Lancaster, her co-star from The Killers, this time with Kirk Douglas and Fredric March, in Seven Days in May (1964), a thriller about an attempted military takeover of the US government.

Gardner played a former love interest of Lancaster's who could have been instrumental in Douglas preventing a coup against the President of the United States.

John Huston chose Gardner for the part of Sarah, the wife of Abraham (played by George C. Scott), in the Dino De Laurentiis film The Bible: In the Beginning..., which was released in 1966.

Nichols never seriously considered her for the part, preferring to cast a younger woman (Anne Bancroft was 35, while Gardner was 44), but he did visit her hotel, where he later said "she sat at a little French desk with a telephone, she went through every movie star cliché.

'"[18] Gardner moved to Tokyo in 1966, undergoing an elective hysterectomy to allay her worries of contracting the uterine cancer that had claimed the life of her mother.

Two years later, she appeared in Mayerling, in which she played the supporting role of Austrian Empress Elisabeth of Austria, with James Mason as Emperor Franz Joseph I.

[19] Soon after Gardner arrived in Los Angeles, she met fellow MGM contract player Mickey Rooney; they married on January 10, 1942.

The ceremony was held in the remote town of Ballard, California because MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer was worried that fans would desert Rooney's Andy Hardy movie series if it became known that their star was married.

[23] Sinatra was blasted by gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the Hollywood establishment, the Catholic Church, and by his fans for leaving his wife.

[39] Concerning politics, Gardner was a lifelong Democrat, and she supported Adlai Stevenson II in the 1952 United States presidential election.

She supported Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party, whose campaign in 1948 for the presidential election sought racial equality and desegregation.

[19][47] In the last years of her life, Gardner asked Peter Evans to ghostwrite her autobiography, stating: "I either write the book or sell the jewels."

Additionally, Gardner won the Silver Shell for Best Actress at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 1964 for The Night of the Iguana.

[49] Gardner has been portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden in the 1992 miniseries Sinatra, by Deborah Kara Unger in the 1998 television film The Rat Pack, by Kate Beckinsale in the 2004 Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, Anna Drijver in the 2012 Italian TV film Walter Chiari – Fino all'ultima risata,[50] and Emily Elicia Low in Frank & Ava (2018).