Rita Hayworth

Born Margarita Carmen Cansino on 17 October 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, the future performer died on 14 May 1987 in New York. An actress and dancer, she ranked among the most celebrated and alluring screen personalities of the 1940s. Hollywood bestowed on her the title “The Love Goddess,” and the Life magazine pin-up of her reclining on a bed in a sheer negligee rivaled the popularity of Betty Grable’s image among troops, even being affixed to the atomic bomb released over Hiroshima. She began dance instruction at age six; after the family relocated to Mexico she formed a professional partnership with her father Eduardo, a noted Spanish dancer. From sixteen onward she performed in numerous inexpensive pictures until she encountered Texas promoter Edward C. Judson. He secured her a Columbia Pictures contract, and they wed in 1937. Early credits included the musicals Music In My Heart and Strawberry Blonde alongside James Cagney. Her breakthrough arrived in 1941 when she danced with Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich; the pair collaborated again the next year on You Were Never Lovelier. She also shared the screen with Victor Mature in My Gal Sal around that period. Following her divorce from Judson she married actor Orson Welles in 1943, and a year later delivered what many regard as her finest musical, Cover Girl, opposite Gene Kelly. In 1945 she appeared in Tonight And Every Night, a London-set tribute to the Windmill Theatre. After clashing with Columbia and declining roles, she entered two further marriages—to playboy Aly Khan and vocalist Dick Haymes—before completing her last musical, Pal Joey, with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak in 1957. Although musicals formed only a modest share of her more than sixty films, several dramatic vehicles featured striking song-and-dance interludes, notably “Put The Blame On Mame” from her signature picture Gilda and the intensely sensual “The Heat’s On” from Miss Sadie Thompson. Experts maintain that vocalists Anita Ellis, Martha Mears, Nan Wynn and Jo Ann Greer supplied her singing voice, which can be heard on the album The Rita Hayworth Collection: 20 Golden Greats. After a fifth marriage to producer James Hill lasting from 1958 to 1961, she continued working in films through the 1970s. During that decade her conduct suggested a withdrawn alcoholic existence, yet only later did daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Kahn disclose that her mother had been battling Alzheimer’s disease. In 1981 she was relocated from California to New York, where a court entrusted her care to Yasmin until her death in 1987.