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Picture a dancer under the lights of a nightclub in Mexico. She is still a teenager, performing with her father. Before long, a film producer notices her. It is an opening into Hollywood—but it will take years, and a carefully remade image, before audiences know her as Rita Hayworth.
She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino in New York City on October 17, 1918. Performance was family business: her father, Eduardo, was a Spanish-born dancer; her mother, Volga, had danced in the Ziegfeld Follies. Margarita was dancing professionally by the age of twelve. As a teenager, she performed with her father in the United States and Mexico, where that encounter with a Fox producer led to a film contract. Her early screen credits, beginning in 1935, bore the name Rita Cansino.
A contract did not mean instant stardom. Rita appeared in a succession of films while Hollywood worked out what to do with her. In 1937 she married Edward Judson, who became her manager. On his advice, she took her mother’s surname, Hayworth, and dyed her hair auburn. Turner Classic Movies also describes the painful electrolysis she underwent to raise her hairline. The transformation was not simply a new name on a marquee; it changed the way the studio presented her.
Her part opposite Cary Grant in the 1939 drama Only Angels Have Wings brought attention. Then the films came faster. In 1941, she appeared in The Strawberry Blonde and danced with Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich. They reunited for You Were Never Lovelier. With Gene Kelly, she starred in the 1944 musical Cover Girl. For anyone who knows her only as a noir icon, these films offer another Rita Hayworth: a dancer whose training had begun long before the cameras found her.
During the Second World War, a photograph of Hayworth became a popular pin-up among American servicemen. Her fame reached its peak with Gilda in 1946. Glenn Ford played Johnny Farrell, a gambler whose boss returns with a new wife—Gilda, Johnny’s former lover. Their hostile, charged encounters gave the film its force. In its most remembered number, Hayworth sang “Put the Blame on Mame” in a black satin gown. The apparent striptease involved removing just one glove.
That scene helped make her unforgettable. It also made Gilda hard to escape. Hayworth later put the distance between her screen persona and her private life in a rueful line: “Every man I’ve known has fallen in love with Gilda and awakened with me.”
Offscreen, Hayworth’s life was changing as quickly as her career. Her marriage to Judson ended. She married actor and director Orson Welles in 1943, and they had a daughter, Rebecca. Their marriage ended in the late 1940s. Hayworth starred in Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, a film that initially disappointed audiences accustomed to her familiar image; in it, she appeared with short blond hair.
In 1949 she married Prince Aly Khan. They had a daughter, Yasmin, before their marriage ended. Hayworth later married and divorced singer Dick Haymes and film producer James Hill. Five marriages became part of the public story told about her, but they were only one part of a life that also included raising two daughters and continuing to work.
She kept appearing on screen, with later roles in Pal Joey and Separate Tables. But opportunities grew scarcer as she aged. Her final film was The Wrath of God, released in 1972.
By then, something more troubling was happening. In 1971, Hayworth left rehearsals for the Broadway musical Applause after struggling to remember her lines. Her increasing difficulties were often attributed to alcohol. For those around her, including Yasmin, the cause was not yet clear.
Yasmin later told the Alzheimer’s Association that, while away at school, she heard her mother ask the same questions repeatedly during their telephone calls. She was worried but did not know what to do. After Hayworth’s condition worsened, Yasmin arranged for her care in New York. A neurologist diagnosed Alzheimer’s disease in the early 1980s.
The diagnosis changed how the family understood years of confusion. It also brought public attention to an illness that was rarely discussed at the time. Yasmin became an advocate for families affected by Alzheimer’s. The first Rita Hayworth Gala, raising awareness and funds for the cause, took place in 1984.
Rita Hayworth died in New York on May 14, 1987. She was sixty-eight. Gilda’s black glove remains one of cinema’s enduring images. But her life was larger than that moment: a child trained to dance, a performer who became a star, and a mother whose daughter helped turn a painful family experience into a public cause.