Rita Hayworth

Margarita Carmen Cansino was born on October 17, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest child of Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish flamenco dancer from Seville, and Volga Hayworth, an American showgirl of Irish and English descent who had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies ^[1]. Dancing was the family trade. Eduardo and his sister Elisa had toured as The Dancing Cansinos, and Eduardo expected his daughter to continue the line. Margarita took dance lessons almost as soon as she could walk and gave her first public performance as a small child ^[2].

When the family moved to California in the late 1920s, Eduardo hoped to find work choreographing for the movies. The Depression narrowed his options, and by the early 1930s he had paired himself with his teenage daughter as a dance act. Because she was too young to perform legally in many American venues, the duo worked casinos and nightclubs across the border in Tijuana and Agua Caliente, Mexico, where a twelve-year-old could pass as her father's partner or even his wife on stage ^[1].

Those Mexican engagements were grueling, and biographers have documented the darker side of her upbringing: Barbara Leaming's 1989 biography, drawing on interviews with Orson Welles and others close to Hayworth, reported that Eduardo abused his daughter during these years, a claim that reshaped public understanding of her guarded personality ^[3]. Whatever the full truth of her childhood, it was in these border clubs that a Fox Film Corporation executive first noticed the young dancer and arranged a screen test ^[2].

Fox signed the sixteen-year-old as Rita Cansino in 1934, and she appeared in a string of small parts, beginning with a dancing role in Dante's Inferno (1935) ^[1]. When Fox merged into Twentieth Century-Fox, the new management dropped her contract. Her first husband and manager, Edward Judson, an older businessman she married in 1937, then engineered the transformation that defined her career. He negotiated a contract at Columbia Pictures, persuaded her to adopt her mother's maiden name as Hayworth, and arranged for painful electrolysis treatments that raised her hairline, while her dark hair was dyed auburn to soften her ethnic typecasting ^[2].

The remade Rita Hayworth worked steadily in Columbia programmers until Howard Hawks borrowed her for Only Angels Have Wings (1939) opposite Cary Grant, her first substantial role in a major production ^[1]. Warner Bros. then cast her in The Strawberry Blonde (1941) with James Cagney, and Twentieth Century-Fox gave her the seductive Doña Sol in the Technicolor bullfighting drama Blood and Sand (1941) ^[2].

Columbia chief Harry Cohn, recognizing what he had, began building pictures around her. She danced with Fred Astaire in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942); Astaire later spoke warmly of her as a favorite screen partner ^[4]. In August 1941, Life magazine published a photograph of Hayworth kneeling on a bed in a satin and lace nightgown. The image, taken by Bob Landry, became one of the most requested pin-up photographs among American servicemen during World War II ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Rita Hayworth at her peak need only look at the years 1944 to 1948. Cover Girl (1944), a Technicolor musical with Gene Kelly, confirmed her as Columbia's biggest asset and one of the top box-office draws in the country ^[2]. Tonight and Every Day (1945) kept the momentum, but it was Gilda (1946), directed by Charles Vidor, that fixed her image permanently. Playing the wife of a Buenos Aires casino owner opposite Glenn Ford, she performed a one-glove striptease to the song Put the Blame on Mame that became one of the most famous scenes in film noir ^[1]. Her singing in the film, as in most of her musicals, was dubbed, in this case by Anita Ellis ^[2].

The role's cultural reach was extraordinary. Newspapers reported that a test atomic bomb detonated at Bikini Atoll in 1946 bore Gilda's image, an association Hayworth reportedly found distressing ^[3]. She followed Gilda with The Lady from Shanghai (1947), directed by her then-husband Orson Welles, who cut her famous red hair short and bleached it blonde for the part; the film puzzled contemporaries but is now regarded as a noir landmark, particularly its hall-of-mirrors finale ^[4].

Among the most repeated Rita Hayworth facts is her own reported lament about the gap between the screen goddess and the woman: versions of the line 'Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me' have been quoted in nearly every account of her life ^[3]. After The Loves of Carmen (1948) she left Hollywood at the height of her fame to marry Prince Aly Khan. When she returned, Affair in Trinidad (1952) with Glenn Ford earned strong grosses, and dramatic parts in Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Pal Joey (1957), and Separate Tables (1958) showed range beyond the love-goddess label ^[1]. Any honest survey of Rita Hayworth achievements ranks her among the essential stars of the studio era: a dancer of genuine skill, a defining face of 1940s glamour, and the anchor of at least two films preserved in the American canon ^[2].

Hayworth married five times, and none of the marriages lasted. Her union with Edward Judson ended in 1942 amid her complaints that he had treated her as an investment rather than a wife ^[3]. In 1943 she married Orson Welles, then the most talked-about young director in America. Their daughter Rebecca was born in 1944, and the marriage dissolved in 1947, though Welles spoke of her with affection and regret for the rest of his life ^[3].

Her 1949 wedding to Prince Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan III, was a global media event, staged on the French Riviera and covered by the world press. Their daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, was born in December 1949. The marriage ended in divorce in 1953 ^[1]. Two further marriages followed, to the singer Dick Haymes (1953 to 1955), a union marked by his financial and legal troubles, and to the producer James Hill (1958 to 1961) ^[2].

Away from the cameras she described herself as shy, a working dancer who had never chosen fame on its own terms. Friends and co-workers consistently drew a distinction between the confident screen presence and the quiet, uncertain woman who created it ^[3].

Hayworth kept working through the 1960s in character parts, including Circus World (1964) with John Wayne and The Money Trap (1965), which reunited her with Glenn Ford ^[2]. Her final film was The Wrath of God (1972). By then, colleagues had noticed trouble: she struggled to remember lines, needed cue cards, and behaved erratically. For years the episodes were blamed on alcohol ^[1].

The real cause was Alzheimer's disease, which in that era was barely known to the public and routinely misdiagnosed. Hayworth was not formally diagnosed until 1980, one of the first famous Americans publicly identified with the illness ^[5]. In 1981 a California court placed her under the care of her daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, who moved her to an apartment adjoining her own in New York City and oversaw her care through the final years ^[1].

Rita Hayworth died in New York City on May 14, 1987, at the age of 68. President Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood colleague, issued a statement of condolence. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California ^[1].

Hayworth's public struggle changed the landscape of American health advocacy. Yasmin Aga Khan became a leading fundraiser for Alzheimer's research, and the annual Rita Hayworth Gala, first held in 1985, has raised tens of millions of dollars for the Alzheimer's Association ^[5]. Because her diagnosis put a beloved face on a poorly understood disease, historians of medicine credit her case with helping push Alzheimer's into public consciousness and onto the federal research agenda ^[5].

On screen, her afterlife has been just as durable. The Gilda poster hangs in Stephen King's novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and in the 1994 film adapted from it, introducing her image to new generations ^[2]. The Lady from Shanghai and Gilda are staples of film noir retrospectives, and Gilda was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2013 for its cultural and historical significance ^[6].

Any full Rita Hayworth biography returns in the end to the distance she herself described between image and person. She was billed as the Love Goddess, a label coined by Life magazine writer Winthrop Sargeant in 1947, yet she remained by most accounts a private, wounded, hard-working professional ^[3]. That tension, between the manufactured icon and the Brooklyn-born dancer named Margarita Cansino, is why her story continues to draw biographers, film scholars, and audiences decades after her death ^[1].