Ava Gardner lived in Madrid for the most passionate time of her life. Anna R. Costa explains it, highlighting the freedom of the Hollywood star.
“With Ava Gardner, my head exploded”, explains Anna R. Costa. “First of all, because she behaved like a man [of that time], that to begin with. Then the fact that he had lived fifteen years in Madrid left me very shocked, discovering that was a fantasy”, says the screenwriter with irony, who achieved enormous success with his series entitled Arde Madrid, in which he described what the time had been like. where the well-known actress lived in Madrid.
Legend has it that Ava Gardner stood up Frank Sinatra in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, after the American Voice crossed the Atlantic just to see it, and immediately went up to the suite that still bears his name, 716, to organize a party that same night. She wanted to be free.
Arde Madrid describes how she was able to go several days without sleep to have fun. That she had no limits in her seduction capacity. “I even got to the point of wondering, really, at that time you could find Ava Gardner on the street, in the San Ginés chocolate shop or in the Mallorquina or in the Chicote Museum? That she lived in the Intercontinental? In the Castellana? Amazing, isn't it?"
Arde Madrid describes how Ava Gardner (Grabtown, North Carolina, USA, 1922) arrived in our country at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, for the filming of the film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in 1952, in Tossa de Mar. He had a crush on what he met and decided to live in Madrid for fourteen years, first in his hotel, then in a chalet in La Moraleja, and finally in an apartment on Calle Doctor Arce 11, in the Viso neighborhood, until he left Spain at the end of the 60s.
"The idea that I had," explains Anna R. Costa, regarding her creative process, "was to write about the contrast between her and any woman of the time, between a woman from Franco's Women's Section, imagine, and a Hollywood star who lived in Madrid and at full speed, with all the freedoms, conquered by herself, that cultural and feminine clash blew my mind”.
"Before, I said that I would love for Ava Gardner to see the series Arde Madrid, and now I would love for her to see my new series Easy, because being a free woman as she was, she would understand these four free women very well," adds the scriptwriter and director. “Maybe Ava would say: ‘I was like that in Hollywood in the 50s,’ Ava she would understand everything now perfectly.”
For Anna R. Costa, “As a creator, I really like not feeling resentful, that helps me get to zero on the starting square every time, it's a great satisfaction. There are lots of anecdotes related to Ava's life that they told me during the time of the investigation, millions, but in the end, they have been, mind you, the ones that have given me the most. What I liked most about Ava Gardner is that she was free, but she was also capable of babysitting ”.
And she also refers to the story of the artist's assistant, “her name is Carmen, I spoke with her son, she is still alive. The one who represents Ana Mari in Arde Madrid is still alive, but she suffers from Alzheimer's, so I couldn't talk to her, but her son brought me a bunch of dresses that Ava Gardner had given him and we talked a lot, I really found it very exciting. I liked that she walked around Madrid with Carmen, that she was the first lady from high society to walk with her assistant as a friend, she was a woman ahead of her time in every way, she did not care what others thought”.
Before writing the script for Arde Madrid, Anna R. Costa recounts that she also worked on a play called The Manual of the Good Wife, whose plot revolved around "the female section, that was another universe that left me shocked, So I was inspired to dig around and see more, and I came across Ava. Was this really like this?"
He continues: "Then when I investigated more I verified that it was a question of social class, when you connect with a huge universe, you notice that you are pulling the thread and it is giving you information that you do not have and that little by little you are expanding before I walk until you start to see a super universe, that's a good story."
About motherhood, she explains how "one thing I really liked about Ava is that she said 'I didn't want to be a mother because I would have been less of a woman being a mother', because motherhood would have taken away her freedom to be the woman she wanted." ", Explain.
"In my case", she adds how "I have been a mother almost in my teens, at 23 years old, and then I have been a mother like many women of my generation, over 40 years old. So I have experienced motherhood from the two most opposite places that a woman can live, I have been a mother too soon and too late and both are equally difficult.
"I am very happy to have been, because as a mother you have the most complete experience on an emotional level, that is very clear to me, you go through all the ins and outs of the rational and the irrational, patience, loss of patience, love, fatigue, understanding, and misunderstanding... you go through the entire emotional arc, I'm talking about motherhood involved and with good circumstances, but of course, many motherhoods can be really difficult”.
“That's what I loved about Ava,” she adds, “that she was a very consistent woman, how many of them got caught up in multiple motherhood at that time, not knowing what was in store for them. She put all the means to not be a mother because she wanted to choose the life she wanted, live as she wanted. She was a very strong woman, even without information, at the time. I fell in love with Ava, she seemed to me like a woman who had two ovaries and four balls”.
.webp)
