SMITHFIELD - This weekend brings the fifth annual Ava Gardner Festival to town. The celebration of the Brogden-born 20th century starlet will feature a new Ava Gardner Museum exhibit about Gardner's friendship with the writer Ernest Hemingway.

Organizers expect the festival to draw about 500 visitors; the numbers will likely be lower than last year because the festival will be shorter than usual. In years past, an independent film festival padded the event's length, but this year the film festival will be held in November.

On Friday, the museum will host a gala and unveil its new exhibit. Then, on Saturday, Smithfield's library will screen three Hemingway films that starred Gardner. People will also get the chance to tour some Gardner landmarks around Smithfield and see the museum's new display.

Many attendees come from around the region or beyond. The museum itself draws many New Yorkers and Floridians off of Interstate 95, said Jessica Meadows Hammett, director of the museum.

"We certainly have people that come back every year," she said. "They're just huge Ava fans."

This year's festival could bring out fans of literature too, Hammett she said. The library will screen the film versions of Hemingway's "The Killers," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Sun Also Rises," and an engraved pocketwatch that Gardner gave to the author will be on display.

Gardner and Hemingway were friends, though he was more than 20 years her elder. She called him "Papa" and he called her "Daughter," according to the museum's files.

After Gardner's 1957 divorce from Frank Sinatra, she and Hemingway spent time in Spain together. The bullfighting rings of Barcelona were a long way from Grabtown, the Brogden crossroads where she was born.

And though she moved at age 13 and later lived a star's life in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Ava often returned to Smithfield. It is said that she saw her first film at the Howell Theater and that she often stayed at the Gabriel Johnston Hotel when she returned for visits.

But for all her future stardom, Gardner was a shy and reserved girl when she lived in Smithfield, Hammett said. Legend has it that she didn't say a word on her first date.

As she grew, she became known for her beauty, bluntness and acting prowess; she seemed to magnetize men all through her life, Hammett said. "A lot of people that knew her would also remark that while she was outspoken, she had a wonderful, almost childlike curiousity," Hammett said.

In her time, she married and divorced Mickey Rooney, musician Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, and she later dated billionaire Howard Hughes and bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin.

Gardner died in 1990 at age 67. Her legacy lives on in Smithfield; the town owns the museum's collection, which numbers some 20,000 items, and Gardner is buried in Sunset Memorial Park. Thomas Banks, a Florida native who met Gardner before her career took off, amassed much of the collection before he died in 1989.

In the 1980s, the museum, which is now a private nonprofit, operated during the summer out of the house where Ava once lived. The museum's board of directors bought the 6,400-foot downtown space in 1999, where the museum has stayed since.

For more information about the festival, call 919-834-5830. Also, Jason Faulkner, a professor of English at East Carolina University, will give a free lecture about Hemingway at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at the Ava Gardner Museum.