Ava Gardner

John Daniell’s Ava Gardner is a biography of Ava Gardner. Open Library gives the publisher as W.H. Allen and the year as 1982. It lists the book under two subjects: biography, and motion picture actors and actresses. The Google Books record also dates it to 1982 but names a different publisher, St Martins Press, and gives a length of 221 pages. Neither record explains why the publishers differ.

The publisher description in the Google Books record says the book is heavily illustrated, with stills from every one of Gardner’s major films. According to that description, the pictures go with an account of a career it calls “tumultuous” and of a private life it describes the same way. Neither record says anything more about what the book contains.

Of the books about Gardner in the catalog, this is the third, counting from the oldest. Charles Higham’s Ava: a life story came first, in 1974, and was also published by W. H. Allen. Judith M. Kass’s Ava Gardner followed in 1977. Roland Flamini’s Ava came out in 1983, a year after Daniell’s book.

For fans

Daniell’s book came out in 1982, so it is one of the early biographies, published before a group of titles that appeared in 1990. Three came out that year. One was Gardner’s own memoir, Ava, which the catalog lists under Bantam. Wikipedia gives a different account: it names Random House as the 1990 publisher of Ava: My Story and dates Bantam’s illustrated reprint to 1992. The other two 1990 books were Karin J. Fowler’s Ava Gardner, a bio-bibliography, and Jane Ellen Wayne’s Ava’s Men. Lee Server’s biography (2006) and Peter Evans’s (2013) came much later.

Next to those titles, Daniell’s book is a 221-page illustrated biography, going by the Google Books record. Beyond the two catalog records and the short publisher description, little is recorded about this book. The sources do not say what Daniell drew on or how reviewers received it.