Beauty Break: Happy Rita Hayworth Centennial !
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 at 10:45AM 
'The Love Goddess' herself, Rita Hayworth, was born on this day 100 years ago in Brooklyn. Audiences first noticed her in a small role in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and she seguewayed into profile boosters like Blood and Sand (1941) and Strawberry Blonde (1941). A natural dancer she made two pictures she obviously cherished with Fred Astaire in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942) -- Astaire went so far as calling her his favorite dancer partner -- and was one of the two ubiquitous pinups of World War II for American soldiers (the other being Betty Grable)...
The photoshoot that GIs obsessed over during World War II
By the mid 40s she was one of Hollywood's top leading ladies headlining films like Cover Girl (1944), Tonight and Every Night (1945), The Lady From Shanghai (1947), and The Loves of Carmen (1948).
She is of course best remembered today for her star turn in Gilda (1946) which is a masterclass in screen magnetism; Stardom honestly doesn't get more transfixing than that. (Noirs weren't as appreciated in their day as they are today but she really ought to have been Oscar-nominated for it.)
Though Grace Kelly's was the only 'princess' Hollywood story that stuck in the public consciousness, Rita Hayworth was actually the first movie star to marry a Prince. She married Prince Aly Khan (who eventually became the Ambassador of Pakistan - the country had just gained independence from British India in 1947) at the peak of her career in 1948 and promptly vanished from screens for four years. They had one child together. Khan had a thing for actresses, though, reportedly seeing both Joan Fontaine and Gene Tierney during their unhappy marriage which ended in 1953.
She returned to Hollywood with Affair in Trinidad (1952), another noir with her Gilda co-star Glenn Ford. After her last hit, the Oscar-nominated Separate Tables (1958), Hayworth made films infrequently, eventually fading from the public eye.
This is one of the last known photos of her above, taken in 1980. Sadly she deterioriated quickly thereafter from early-onset Alzheimers and died in 1987 at the age of 68. Her daughter Yasmin Aga Khan is the president of Alzheimer's Disease International which works for global solutions and to share information about dementia.
Some more glorious photos of The Love Goddess to cherish on her centennial...
Lovely forever.
Reader Comments (25)
Yesterday I've posted a comment about Don and Joan flirting in that bar in Mad Men. The following day he sends her flowers with a note signed as Aly Khan. I love these little things in Mad Men.
On Rita: love her in The Lady From Shanghai above every other role, including Gilda.
Just a breathtaking woman!
Fantastic collection of pictures, my first thought on seeing that last one "Boy those lips are RED!"
She wasn't the greatest actress in the world but better than she was given credit for in her heyday and her screen magnetism was 1,000 watts.
She's marvelously droll in The Strawberry Blonde and I agree she should have received a nod for Gilda. Those two movies with Astaire really do highlight was a graceful lissome creature she was in dance, too bad she never made a full out musical for MGM.
She left such a wonderful legacy behind that it's sad to know that her life for the most part was not a very happy one. The biography of her "If This Was Happiness" is an interesting read and well researched but tells a grim tale. Her daughter Princess Yasmin has said that in retrospect she realizes that there were signs of Alzheimers in Rita's behavior as early as 1949.
Happily she's Star of the Month on TCM and they've been showing a trove of her films to be rediscovered.
One of my all time favorite actresses! Legend.
Also, in terms of beauty, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner take the price of everyone.
GODDESS.
Fred Astaire wrote that they were on the vaudeville circuit together. Her father danced in the Spanish style and Margarita Cansino was her father’s very young partner. Fred said he learned a lot of style technique from watching the father dance (although the dad was apparently not a very nice person).
So Fred felt they’d both been hard working since childhood.
She is heavenly light on her feet, and her whole body moves with such grace.
Even with a minor script in movies like Down to Earth(1947) and Salome(1953), Rita makes it worth watching. Great writing and images.
I know film critics these days have an odd relationship to The Shawshank Redemption, but that film's mythology and love of Rita Hayworth really holds up nicely.
Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe justify the creation and use of the expensive and complex Technicolor process.
Although I think she looks beautiful, of course, also in black and white.
As a Latino I can't really celebrate her Hollywood status or pay tribute to her filmography if she had to become white to achieve it. Even if that was the way in those days (still happening though. A lot of people have to pass to get a career in the industry) it's very hurtful.
Again it's a lovely tribute but I want to throw out a Happy Birthday to Marsha Hunt who was also born on this day 101 years ago and is still with us!! Actually its quite a star heavy day birthday wise.
Her appeal went beyond her Latino roots and it was very common in those days to change your name -( hey it hasn't hurt Oscar Isac's career either) One of the most beautiful woman to ever become a movie star .
@Me34, unless you’re Native American and not at all descended from Spanish conquistadors (or other European “settlers”) in Latin America, you are white (i.e. Caucasian), too.
Latinx actually can white, brown, black, and in between, while Hayworth’s changing her name was par for the course for *most* stars during Hollywood’s golden era (Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, John Wayne, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, etc.).
Hayworth also dyed her hair, the most luscious locks of the era. And her lips weren’t really that red, so she was changing up a lot of herself. ;-)
I was pleasantly surprised by her performance in "Miss Sadie Thompson", it's what I love about film, you can revisit these great performances time and time again.
@Mareko: I seriously don't get what you're trying to say and what's your point, but I'm direct descendent of one indigenous tribe and I was born, raised and live in Argentina and we use the term America to refer to the continent, not USA, so the term native American applies to me. Also most people in Latin American who happened to be mixed tend to look more ethnic and are not considered white neither do they look. In conclusion, I'm a person of color and so was Hayworth before every procedure she did to change her appearance. A big reason why she became famous were her new looks.
Hayworth deserved two Oscar nominations in her career. Gilda, of course, but The Lady from Shanghai is one of the greatest films ever made, and she's spectacular in it. Looking at that rather tired lineup (Maguire, Hayward, Russell, and Young all in relatively tired or underwhelming performances) it's a damn shame she didn't land a citation for it. Imagine a world where both she and Gloria Grahame (in Crossfire) won for their best work at the Oscars that year!
To be fair you use "star turn" and "magnetism" instead of say, 'acting triumph' or 'tour de force', so unconsciously I think you can understand those back then not nominating her.
@Me34, it's simple: "Hayworth was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1918 as Margarita Carmen Cansino, the oldest child of two dancers. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, was from Castilleja de la Cuesta, a little town near Seville, Spain. Her mother, Volga Hayworth, was an American of Irish-English descent who had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies." Hayworth was neither Latina, nor a "person of color" (which, incidentally, are not automatically the same); she was the child of a European immigrant father and a mother who descended from European (i.e. Caucasian) immigrants. So she didn't "become white," she *was* white—and some white people are darker complected than others. (That doesn't qualify them as people of color.) Your taking umbrage or making it somehow personal ("As a Latino I can't really celebrate her Hollywood status...") makes no sense because you're talking about a white woman to begin with, who happens to have a Spanish name from her Spanish father. And plenty of stars (past and present) like Hayworth change things about their appearance; such actions aren't forcibly a betrayal of whatever race or tribe you've assigned her to. That's my point.
Mareko’s absolutely right.
Everything is not identity politics, take a few seconds to google/Wikipedia/imdb or whatever before you come to any easy conclusion.
So beautiful and seductive, wonderful dancer. Pity that she was member of that notorious club of Divas not beloved by the Academy, along with Monroe, Harlow and Novak, just to name a few. Fab club anyway
I actually wish today's stars would also change their names. There are so many young actors with such unwieldy long and hyphenated names and I wonder if they've ever thought about how hard it is to be famous/ legendary / mythologized (aka a huge star) with a name that's hard to remember?
R.I.P., Miss Hayworth. You deserve it.
One of the most naturally sensuous women in the movies.
In 1940's decade Rita with Columbia, Bette Davis with Warners and Judy Garland in MGM are the perfect examples of stars working in studios that understood them, their appeal and qualities. Resulting in great movies, some classics. My top 10 RH:
SEPARATE TABLES /58
PAL JOEY /57
SALOME /53
AFFAIR IN TRINIDAD /52
THE LADY FROM SHANGAI /47
DOWN TO EARTH /47
GILDA /46
COVER GIRL /44
YOU WERE NEVER LOVELIER /42 &
YOU'LL NEVER GET RICH /41
BLOOD AND SAND /41