During the 1950s, Gardner established herself as a leading lady and one of the era's top stars with films like Show Boat, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (both 1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), Mogambo (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956) and On the Beach (1959).
Source: Wikipedia
The sex symbol did get spanked by Gregory Peck in On the Beach - viewtopic.php?t=547
...and narrowly avoided another screen spanking - but wouldn't have minded a public spanking it would seem.
Via SpankStatement:
From an article about the spanking in the stage play "The little hut" (it was not included in the 1957 movie version with Ava Gardner):
The spanking scene was included in the script of the film version which went to the Hays Office in 1956, but was later cut. Whether this was Ava Gardner's doing is something we shall never know for sure, but I can tell you that Ava very nearly got a public spanking in a California bar during an interview with Joe Hyams of Look magazine. He had asked her a slightly near the knuckle question and she punched him, knocking him out of his chair. In his autobiography, Mislaid in Hollywood, he tells what happened next:
Picking myself up, I jerked Ava from her chair and started to lay her over my knee for a spanking. It was the first time I had touched her, and I was surprised that she was so light, and so soft and feminine. For a moment we were frozen in a tableau. Then I was aware of sounds around us and eyes on us. "Don't ever do that again," I said, slowly releasing her. She looked at me then, but instead of being angry she was smiling.
Hyams doesn't explicitly give a date for this, but from references to other events it looks like it must have been in 1955, the year before she avoided the spanking in The Little Hut.
(This incident is mentioned prominently in Hyam's obituary in The Times - he died in 2008).
