"Who played Ava Gardner in ""The Aviator""?"
Ava Gardner for best actress for her performance in "The Night of the Iguana". Gardner has been portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden in the 1992 TV mini-series "Sinatra"; Deborah Kara Unger in HBO's 1998 television movie "The Rat Pack"; Kate Beckinsale in the 2004 Howard Hughes biopic "The Aviator"; and Anna Drijver in the 2012 Italian TV film "Walter Chiari – Fino all'ultima risata". (Strangely, for a Martin Scorsese film, "The Aviator" includes a chronological error by depicting Hughes meeting Gardner at the premiere of the 1939 movie "The Women"—an event that occurred two years prior to her arrival in Hollywood.) The
Ava Gardner was published eight months after her death. Gardner remained good friends with Sinatra for the rest of her life. Gardner became a friend of businessman and aviator Howard Hughes in the early to mid-1940s, and the relationship lasted into the 1950s. Gardner stated in her autobiography, "Ava: My Story", that she was never in love with Hughes, but he was in and out of her life for about 20 years. Hughes' trust in Gardner was what kept their relationship alive. She described him as "painfully shy, completely enigmatic, and more eccentric ... than anyone [she] had ever met". After Gardner