Ava Gardner Sang (Show Boat)
Ava Gardner – once reported to be the most beautiful woman in the world, was an American actress ( December 24, 1922 January 25, 1990). She drew attention with her performance in The Killers (1946) and became one of Hollywood’s leading actresses. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Mogambo(1953). She appeared in several popular films during the 1950s, and received BAFTA Award nominations for her performances in Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1964). She is listed as one of the American Film Institute’s greatest stars of all time. Other films include The Hucksters (1947), Showboat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), 1954’s The Barefoot Contessa (which some consider to be Gardner’s “signature film” which mirrored her real life custom of going barefoot), Bhowani Junction (1956), The Sun Also Rises in which she played party-girl Brett Ashley (1957), and the film version of Neville Shute’s best-selling On the Beach, co-starring Gregory Peck. Off-camera, she could be witty and pithy. Show Boat is a 1951 film based on the musical by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (script and lyrics) and the novel by Edna Ferber. Filmed previously in 1936, the Kern-Hammerstein musical was remade in 1951 by MGM in Technicolor, starring Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel, with Joe E. Brown, Marge Champion, Gower Champion, William Warfield, Robert Sterling, Agnes Moorehead and Leif Erickson.
Video Rating: 5 / 5