A month earlier than her passing, in 1990, Ava Gardner obtained {a magazine} clipping and a word from her good friend Gregory Peck. “You are at all times on our minds. Try arduous to get higher,” he wrote to her from Beverly Hills, signing the message, “With love, Greg.”
The actors met in 1948, costarred in three movies and have become “nice outdated buddies” for practically a half-century. “He was any person that she may actually be herself with,” Lynn Haney Trowbridge, creator of Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life, tells Closer. “She didn’t need to placed on a entrance. She may simply be a small-town woman.”
Despite their beauty and glamorous careers, the actors acknowledged one thing extra humble in one another. Gregory’s mother and father break up when he was 6, and he spent his California childhood ricocheting between them. As a younger man, he paid his means via faculty by working as a janitor. Ava, in the meantime, was a North Carolina sharecropper’s daughter and the youngest of seven. She was 15 when her father died and her mom opened a boarding home.
Neither Gregory nor Ava had hit the massive time but once they met at a Look journal get together in 1948. “It was like we had been younger individuals from the identical hometown,” mentioned Gregory, who was then married to his first spouse, Greta. “We struck up an instantaneous friendship. Ava was additionally outspoken, and there was one thing refreshing about that.”
Not lengthy after, the pair costarred in The Great Sinner. On set, Gregory acknowledged Ava’s “immense potential and tried to encourage her to imagine in her expertise and work at it,” recalled Ava’s housekeeper Mearene Jordan in her ebook, Living With Miss G.
The actors reunited three years later for The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a movie primarily based on the Ernest Hemingway brief story. Ava would give considered one of her finest performances in it. “She did issues in Kilimanjaro that she couldn’t have performed three years earlier,” Gregory gushed.
By the time they filmed 1959’s On the Beach in Australia, Ava had additionally grow to be near Gregory’s second spouse, Veronique. The couple rented a house throughout the manufacturing that grew to become a gathering place for the movie’s actors, together with Ava, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.
The break was a lot wanted. Creating the postapocalyptic movie was bodily demanding. “There could be 1000’s of flies crawling on Ava’s brow and in her hair,” recalled Gregory, who praised his co-star’s braveness. “She took it like a trouper, and we simply stored plugging away.”
In the final three a long time of her life, Ava lived primarily in London, however she remained in contact with Gregory and Veronique. When she died from pneumonia at age 67, the couple adopted her beloved corgi, Morgan, and employed Ava’s housekeeper to work for them. “[Ava] was significantly better than she thought she was. She had no self-importance about her expertise,” mentioned Gregory of his pricey good friend. “She did nothing that lowered her requirements as an actress or as a girl.”
