How Ava Gardner Found ‘Freedom’ In Spain Following Her Tumultuous Marriage to Frank Sinatra

After her devastating divorce from Frank Sinatra, screen beauty Ava Gardner packed up and moved to Spain — but she couldn’t run away from the Hollywood gossip that followed her.

“In Spain, I wasn’t Ava Gardner, movie star,” she once said. “I was Ava, the woman.”

Born in Grabtown, N.C., Ava’s beauty brought her to the bright lights of Tinseltown, where she quickly became a star in demand.

“She was never a great actress, but she was good in movies,” says Lawrence Grobel, author of “Conversations with Ava Gardner.”

Unfortunately, her love life was not a success. Ava suffered through failed marriages to Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw — but it was her 1951 third marriage to Sinatra that turned people against her.

The blue-eyed crooner divorced his long-suffering wife Nancy — mother of his three children — to wed Ava.

“Of course, Ava became vilified in the press,” confides Darwin Porter, a writer and friend of Ava’s. “She was denounced as a whore in Congress, and preachers talked about her in their Sunday sermons.”

Ava and Sinatra’s tumultuous marriage was filled with fighting, frequent breakups and makeups and late-night boozing. Sinatra “continued to be involved with other women,” says Porter. “He also accused her of having a lot of affairs with other men, which for at least a couple of years was not true.”

And until Sinatra’s career-rejuvenating role as Angelo Maggio in the 1953 classic “From Here to Eternity,” the couple had money woes.

“She was supporting him,” adds Porter.

With her marriage to Sinatra crumbling, Ava moved to Spain in 1955 despite being under contract from 1941 to 1958 with MGM, where she declared herself as “a prize hog.”

Ava later confessed to British journalist John Sandilands that she didn’t even like acting.

“I’m supposed to be this great movie actress, this film star, and that’s not me at all,” she complained. “When I’m not making pictures, my life is very good and very important.”

In Madrid, she spent her days reading and listening to music on her rooftop terrace and her nights drinking, smoking, eating and dancing on tabletops. Ava noted of her late-night escapades, “If you knew your way around, the nights went on forever.”

Sinatra and Ava divorced in 1957, but the cruel gossip didn’t stop. She moved to London in 1968 in search of a quieter life and lived there until she died at age 67 in 1990. But she never forgot her time in Madrid.

Said Ava, “Spain was freedom.”