AVA GARDNER

Because I was promoted as a sort of a 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 suffered, I really suffered, with all three of my husbands. And I tried damn hard with all three, starting each marriage certain that it was going to last until the end of my life. Yet none of them lasted more than a year or two.

Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.

I have only one rule in acting - trust the director and give him heart and soul.

I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.

What's the point? My face, shall we say, looks lived in.

I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.

I don't curtsy to Frank Sinatra and I'm not going to curtsy to a fucking king.

I was born with good health and a strong body and spent years abusing them.

Mickey - the smallest husband I ever had and the biggest mistake I ever made - well, that year, it was.

Mama, you know, poor baby, she'd had her family all finished: four daughters and a couple of sons, and suddenly, I arrived in her midlife on Christmas Eve 1922.

I never played a woman who was smarter than me.

The marriages to Mickey and Artie were easy come, easy go. I called them my 'starter husbands!'

I go on tremendous health kicks - exercise, yogurt, no booze. Of course, I smoke too much.

It's a shame that it didn't work out with Mick. I was hopelessly in love with him.

I'm not saying my own looks don't give the game away. Nothing I can do about that anymore. A nip and tuck ain't gonna do it.

Nobody could pile on the applesauce like Mickey. He was the best liar in the world - well, Frank Sinatra can tell a good story, too, but I don't believe he was ever unfaithful to me.

There was no way the marriages could have survived. Nor do I regret that they didn't.

When you get to be my age, baby, you have to pay time more respect.

It's a pity nobody believes in simple lust anymore.

I fell down in Hyde Park with a friend who'd had a hip operation, and neither of us could get up again. People must have thought we were a couple of drunks rolling around and walked on by.

To be possessed when you are a child is just a wonderful feeling. It makes you feel safe. It makes you feel loved. But later if anyone tried to possess me - oh boy, I was out of there.

I do owe Mickey one thing: he taught me how much I enjoyed sex.

It's fine being stared at as a pretty girl, but not as a freak. When I tried to make myself ugly, they said, 'Oh, she's lost her looks.'

I hate journalists. I don't trust them.