Ava Gardner, 67, Dies of Pneumonia : Film Beauty Once Married Rooney, Sinatra, Artie Shaw

Ava Gardner, the sharecropper’s daughter whose specialty in films was the sloe-eyed sensuous beauty and whose husbands ranged from Mickey Rooney to Frank Sinatra, died today at her home in London.

She was 67 and died of pneumonia, a recurring illness she had been battling for several years.

Famed for her natural beauty and understated acting style, she became equally known for the men she attracted. They ranged from orchestra leader Artie Shaw, whom she also married, to Spanish matadors whom she did not.

Never considered a great actress in the classic sense of that word, she brought to her more than 60 pictures a magnetic quality that proved box-office prosperity.

She spanned a generation of sex kittens and love goddesses between Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe before settling in Europe in the 1960s.

In an interview in 1982, Miss Gardner said she would happily have traded her career for one happy, long-lasting marriage: “One good man I could love and marry and cook for and make a home for, who would stick around for the rest of my life.

“The trouble was that I was a victim of image,” she said. “Because I was promoted as a sort of siren and played all those sexy broads, people made the mistake of thinking I was like that off the screen. They couldn’t have been more wrong. . . . I was a country girl and I still have a country girl’s rather simple, ordinary values.”

The country girl was indeed that, born Ava Lavinnia Gardener on her family’s farm in Smithfield, N.C., the youngest of five children. Her father lost his farm when she was only 2 and was forced to grow tobacco and cotton for shares of those crops.

After her father’s death in 1938, her mother ran a boarding house for minimal money and the young Ava remembered later the taunts of her classmates when she was forced to attend high school in tattered clothes.

On a visit to New York her brother-in-law, a commercial photographer, took a number of portraits of her. One of them was sent to Metro Goldwyn Mayer, who ordered a screen test.

Her first film was “We Were Dancing” in 1942, a stylish romantic comedy with Norma Shearer and Melvyn Douglas. But her reputation as a sex goddess was launched in the 1946 film, “The Killers,” co-starring Burt Lancaster.

She played a wild Spanish dancer opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Barefoot Contessa,” and a love-hungry hotel proprietress chasing Richard Burton in Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana.”

Her first marriage had come earlier, in 1942 to Rooney. He was 21 and she was 19. They were divorced after 20 months. She met bandleader Shaw at a nightclub, and they were married in 1945. Miss Gardner later suffered a nervous breakdown and the marriage ended a year after it began.

She met Sinatra, whose career was in a slump, at a party. They were married in 1951 and divorced in 1957, just as she finished making “The Sun Also Rises.”

A full page of pictures of actress Ava Gardner. P12