Kate Beckinsale’s favourite Ava Gardner performance: “I think she’s stupendous”
Playing a real person in a movie can be a double-edged sword. Get it right, and you’ll probably get nominated for an Oscar. Those guys love it when people play real people. However, get it wrong, and you’ll have all sorts of people on your back complaining about how “inaccurate” the portrayal was and how you’ve “tarnished the legacy” of an all-time great.
Kate Beckinsale must have found this out when she accepted the role of Ava Gardner in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator. A celebrated film star in the 1940s and ’50s, Gardner was also a love interest of the billionaire Howard Hughes, the film’s protagonist as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio.
To get into character, Beckinsale checked out some of Gardner’s most famous performances. According to an interview with Hollywood, one movie in particular stood out from the rest. “I had to watch Mogambo so many times,” she confessed. “Because that was really Marty‘s number one favourite for the voice, and that was the age that she was, so that has become almost by attrition my favourite one.” She said that, initially, her favourite Gardner movie was The Barefoot Contessa, but called the star “stupendous” in Mogambo and admitted that it had taken over the top spot.
Directed by John Ford and released in 1954, Mogambo stars Gardner as a wealthy woman from New York who becomes involved with a big game hunter while travelling through Africa. The picture also features Clark Gable, Donald Sinden, and Grace Kelly, who won a Golden Globe for her efforts. Gardner was nominated for ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars for her part, but lost out to Aubrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
Beckinsale spoke of what drew her to the role of Gardner, saying that her iconic voice played a significant part. “I’m always very attracted to people’s vocal patterns”, she revealed. ”She [Gardner] had a deeper voice than I have, and that was a challenge to pull that off without sounding like you’re doing a funny voice.”
She explained that Scorsese was keen to avoid any sense of parody when it came to Gardner or the other major Hollywood actress in the film, Katharine Hepburn, who was played by Cate Blanchett. “Marty didn’t want her in prosthetic chins and fake eyeballs and God knows what,” she said. “He didn’t want a Saturday Night Live skit version of Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner. The most important thing was to capture the spirit.”
The Aviator, which details Hughes’ extravagant life as a wealthy businessman and then his eventual decline into poor mental health, was very well-received. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won five of them. While Blanchett was honoured for her portrayal of Hepburn, Beckinsale wasn’t even nominated.
Ava Gardner was an active actor until the mid-1980s, regularly finding good work even as so many of her Golden Age contemporaries fell off the map. Her next most-acclaimed role after Magambo was in The Night of the Iguana, a 1964 adaptation of the Tennesse Williams play of the same name. She was nominated for a Golden Globe and a Bafta for her portrayal of an eccentric widow. In addition to her romance with Hughes, Gardner was also married to fellow actor Mickey Rooney (albeit for only a year) and to legendary crooner Frank Sinatra. She passed away in 1990 at the age of 67.
