Everything You Didn’t Know About The Starlet
Rita Hayworth is one of Old Hollywood’s most recognizable and glamorous stars but while her roles have remained iconic, many important facts about her life have been forgotten. Rita’s rise to the top was filled with pain and turmoil, as was much of her adult life off-screen – but through her immense talent and tenacity, she managed to carve out a legacy as one the most iconic Hollywood actresses of all time. More than just a glamorous bombshell, she will also always be remembered for being a kind and caring person. In his last ever interview, Orson Welles called her “one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived.” So today we’re digging into some things you might not have known about the legendary actress’s often less-than-glamorous real-life story.
Her Passion, But Hatred For Dance
Rita was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, New York on October 17th, 1918. Performing was in her blood – her mother was a Ziegfeld Follie, her father Eduaro was a professional dancer, and her paternal grandfather was also a world-renowned classical Spanish dancer. Rita was given dance lessons as soon as she learned to walk, and though she later admitted she “didn’t like it very much” she was too afraid to confront her overbearing, controlling (and allegedly sexually abusive) father about it. So she was forced to continue with daily dance lessons for her entire childhood.
Rita’s father was convinced that the family could become famous through their dancing and so in 1927 moved the family across the country to Hollywood to make it happen. Since she was too young to work dancing in nightclubs at the time, eventually her father started taking her across the border to work with him in Tijuana, Mexico. While she would go on to play vivacious, glamorous characters, Rita herself was very reserved and shy growing up. Loretta Parkin, a neighbor of the Cansino family in California, said, “For Rita, there was no life, no school, no friends, no girlfriends… Just sitting, sitting, sitting. Till it was time to go to Tijuana.” Eventually, Eduardo’s hopes came true and Rita was scouted by the head of the Fox Film Corporation, Winfield Sheehan. Rita was set up with a screen test back in Los Angeles and started on the path to her Hollywood career…
A Tough Start In The Business
Rita signed a 6-month contract with Fox in 1935 and appeared in small parts in films like Dante’s Inferno and Charlie Chan in Egypt, but in the end, her contract wasn’t renewed. She worked her first Hollywood contract as ‘Rita Cansino,’ but eventually changed her last name to ‘Hayworth’ on the advice of her first agent, who also became her first husband, Edward C. Judson (despite being 22 years older than her.) Judson was controlling in much the same way as her father and was also equally as dead set on making Rita a star. He got her a few small freelance parts in films with various studios until they got lucky in 1936 with Meet Nero Wolfe with Columbia Pictures. Rita was signed to a seven-year contract by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn once he saw her on screen.
While her father had made her dye her brown hair black when she began dancing in nightclubs in Mexico, once she was under Cohn’s control she was made to lighten her hair beyond even its natural color to the red that became her signature color. Cohn wanted her to look “less ethnic,” so in addition to changing her hair color, she was also forced to undergo painful electrolysis procedures to raise her hairline. Rita would continue to have a difficult working relationship with the domineering studio boss for the rest of her working career with Columbia. In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in 1968, Rita said, “He was very possessive of me as a person, he didn’t want me to go out with anybody, have any friends. No one can live that way. So I fought him… You want to know what I think of Harry Cohn? He was a monster.”
Her Big Breakthrough
In the late 1930s, Rita began getting bigger parts in larger films and finally got a major breakthrough with the 1941 musical You’ll Never Get Rich. The musical allowed Rita to showcase her hard-earned dancing skills next to industry legend Fred Astaire, and the film was a huge success for Columbia. The pair worked so well together, in fact, that they made You Were Never Lovelier together the next year. (And Fred Astaire even allegedly once admitted that Rita, not long-time dance partner Ginger Rogers, was actually his favorite star to dance with!)
Surprisingly, one of Rita’s first big brushes with superstardom came not from a film but a photograph. In her second spread for LIFE Magazine, one image featuring Rita in a lacy nightgown made her the second most popular pin-up with American soldiers during World War II. Between this and her successful musicals, Rita was finally on her way to the top in Hollywood. During the 1940s, she became a huge box office draw and the biggest star at Columbia with hits like the musical Cover Girl and the iconic Gilda. The 1946 classic featured Rita as the titular Gilda, a bombshell femme fatale out to make her ex jealous by parading around with other guys. The film features one of Rita’s most iconic scenes, Gilda performing a striptease while singing “Put the Blame on Mame,” and the film has been referenced countless times in pop culture over the years.
Rita’s Marriages and Divorces
In 1943, Rita married iconic auteur Orson Welles on her lunch break during a filming day of Cover Girl and they went on to have a daughter named Rebecca (Rita allegedly chose the name because she had become enamored with Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe” after Orson had gotten her into reading classic literature.) Their marriage was incredibly tumultuous and they eventually agreed to split in 1946, though Rita did agree to star in his 1947 film The Lady From Shanghai, which was a flop financially but for which she got great reviews for her performance. The pair officially divorced in 1948, the same year she met her next husband. Grace Kelly is often credited as being ‘Hollywood’s Princess,’ but in fact, Rita became Hollywood’s first princess when she married Prince Aly Khan in 1949.
Unfortunately for Rita, becoming a princess wasn’t a fairytale – she had a difficult time making life work in France (especially since she didn’t speak French) and that, compounded with Prince Aly’s alleged infidelity, meant the marriage was doomed. Rita left him in 1951 and they officially divorced in 1953. Though she had hoped to escape Hollywood with her marriage to the Prince, once they separated she had to head back to work. Her comeback film Affair in Trinidad had a bit of a troubled shoot but in the end was a success, earning even more than Gilda.
The Dark, Hidden Struggle
Throughout much of her adult life, Rita struggled with alcoholism. Those close to her believed that she drank to deal with the pain of her childhood and the stresses of fame. Her daughter with Prince Aly Kahn, Yasmin, once said, “She had difficulty coping with the ups and downs of the business… Her condition became quite bad. It worsened and she did have an alcoholic breakdown and landed in the hospital.”
Starting in the late 1960s, she began having trouble with her memory, from forgetting her lines on set to forgetting who people were and becoming easily confused. In 1972 while filming The Wrath of God, Rita had to have her part fed to her line by line because she was unable to remember an entire scene at once. And a confused and disheveled Rita had to be escorted off of a plane in 1976 after an outburst, which led to negative press attention and scrutiny. Her ex-husband Orson Welles recalled that when we approached Rita at a party in the late 1970s, it took her several minutes of conversation to be able to remember who he was, at which point, “she realized who I was, and she began to cry quietly.”
The reality was that her drinking was covering up symptoms of a much worse problem: the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Due to Alzheimer’s disease being, at the time, poorly documented, and everyone in her life assuming she was just suffering from alcoholic dementia, Rita wasn’t officially diagnosed until 1980. By July 1981, Rita was in such poor health that the state of California had to appoint her daughter Yasmin as her caretaker and administrator of affairs. Rita’s diagnosis with the disease was made public in 1981 and as medical historian Barron H. Lerner noted, she became “the first public face of Alzheimer’s, helping to ensure that future patients did not go undiagnosed.” The attention she brought to the disease helped increase federal funding for research, and in 1985 Yasmin founded the Rita Hayworth Gala, a benefit to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association. After her long battle with the illness, Rita passed away in her Manhattan apartment on May 14, 1987, at the age of 68.
Rita’s life might seem to follow the glamorous-yet-tragic trajectory we so often see on screen, but her story is much more complex and important than any trope that people might try to box her into. Her story highlights how important it is to not attempt to force anyone to be just any one thing, or ignore that there might be more going on under the surface.
Sources:
Meares, Hadley Hall. “The Love Goddess: Rita Hayworth’s Tragic Quest” VanityFair, 23 Sept 2020 https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/rita-hayworth-biography-trauma
“Rita Hayworth American actress” Britannica, 10 May 2023 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rita-Hayworth
Lerner, Barron H. “Rita Hayworth’s misdiagnosed struggle” LA Times, 20 Nov 2006 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-nov-20-he-myturn20-story.html
Lindstrom, Pia. “Alzheimer’s Fight in Her Mother’s Name” NY Times, 23 Feb 1997 https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/23/nyregion/alzheimer-s-fight-in-her-mother-s-name.html
“Rita Hayworth” The Timeless Theater, https://www.timelesstheater.com/rita-hayworth.html
Kilday, Gregg. “When Rita Hayworth Married Orson Welles During Her Lunch Break” The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Nov 2021 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/orson-welles-rita-hayworth-marriage-1235039862/
“LIFE With Rita Hayworth: Hollywood Legend, Pinup Icon” LIFE, https://web.archive.org/web/20131017141445/http://life.time.com/icons/rita-hayworth-photos-of-a-movie-legend-and-all-american-pinup-girl/#1
Hallowell, John. “Hollywood Still Is Her Town But No One Knows She’s There” St. Petersburg Times, 23 Jun 1968 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ViMMAAAAIBAJ&dq=rita%20hayworth%20said&pg=6610%2C1537036