When her first husband, Mickey Rooney, brought his hugely successful musical "Sugar Babies" to London in the late 1980s, Gardner confessed to him that she had contemplated suicide after being left partially paralyzed by two strokes in 1986.
When shooting Earthquake (1974), she surprised director Mark Robson by insisting that she do her own stuntwork, which included dodging blocks of concrete and heavy steel pipes.
While living in Spain, became a good friend of writer Ernest Hemingway, whom she and others called Papa. Both were aficionados of bullfighting.
While pregnant with Frank Sinatra's child, she had an abortion because Sinatra was still married to his first wife.
Youngest of seven children, her older siblings were Raymond, Melvin ('Jack'), Beatrice ('Bappie'), Elsie Mae, Inez and Myra.