I confess. I have a special interest in North Carolina women who have somehow gained national attention for their talents or notoriety. Most recently I have written about the musician and composer Rhiannon Giddens and U.
S. Rep Virginia Foxx, both of whom have gained much attention. Last week The New Yorker republished a 2013 story by David Denby about Ava Gardner, the lovely movie star who grew up in North Carolina.
According to the article, “When she was young, she was the most beautiful woman in the movies, more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe — both of whom were better actresses.” Denby wrote, “Ava Gardner, with her thick black hair, bowed lips, cleft chin, and green eyes, wearing a scarlet necklace that matches her lipstick, and a white peasant blouse pulled off one shoulder. Admiration struggles against disbelief: how could anyone look that good?” Gardner was born Dec.
24, 1922, near Smithfield. She died in London at 67 years of age on Jan. 25, 1990.
She grew up poor. Her father was a struggling tobacco farmer who lostn his land and became a sharecropper. Her mother ran boarding houses and the family struggled to help make ends meet.
How did a poor teenager from rural North Carolina in and near Johnston County get to Hollywood and become one of the greatest movie stars? Denby writes that “in the spring of 1941, when Gardner was eighteen and enrolled in a secretarial course, she visited her older sister, Bappie, who was living in New York. Ba.
