Clothes for Ava Gardner paper doll with hands behind back

Paper dolls are figures cut out of paper, with separate clothes, that can be dressed and undressed. They have been popular toys for children, as well as collectors' items, for many centuries. The origins of paper dolls can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where tomb paintings depict children playing with paper dolls. In medieval Europe, paper dolls were also popular, and were often used as teaching tools to instruct young girls in the art of sewing and clothing design. Paper dolls became especially popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries when they were mass-produced and sold as cheap toys. Many popular children's books and magazines featured paper dolls as inserts or bonuses, and girls would often spend hours playing with them and creating new outfits for their dolls. Today, paper dolls are still popular, although they are not as widespread as they once were. They continue to be collected by enthusiasts and are often used as a creative outlet for artists and designers.

Ava Gardner (1922–1990), American film actress of the 1940s and ’50s who, despite her renowned beauty and sensuality, successfully resisted being typecast as a sex symbol. “Earthy femininity” is an apt and oft-used description for Gardner’s screen persona, a quality acquired in part during her rural upbringing. The daughter of a poor tobacco farmer, Gardner was something of a tomboy and gave no thought to an acting career until age 18, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts spotted portraits of her in the window of her brother-in-law’s New York City photography studio. She was given a screen test, in which her lack of refinement and barely intelligible thick drawl prompted MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer to proclaim, “She can’t act. She can’t talk. She’s terrific. Sign her.” Heavily coached in acting, poise, and elocution by the studio, Gardner appeared mostly in decorative bit parts during the first four years of her screen career. Her big break came when the studio loaned her to Universal Pictures for the film noir classic The Killers (1946), in which Gardner played a duplicitous seductress opposite screen newcomer Burt Lancaster. She was subsequently cast in better roles at MGM—where she was promoted as “The World’s Most Beautiful Animal”—and at other studios in such films as The Hucksters (1947), One Touch of Venus (1948), Show Boat (1951), and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952).