Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth: The Dancer Behind Gilda

Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse, and half the great female stars of Hollywood's golden age. Asked, late in life, who his favorite partner had been, he did not hesitate: "It was Rita Hayworth." The woman millions knew as the smoldering femme fatale of *Gilda* had, in fact, been dancing since before she could reliably walk — trained by a father who put her onstage as a child and, she later confided, abused her on the road. Hayworth's career was built on that early, exacting craft; her later life was consumed by an illness that took the very memory of it away.

A Dancing Dynasty

She was born Margarita Carmen Cansino on 17 October 1918 in Manhattan, the eldest of three children of Eduardo Cansino, a Spanish-born dancer from Castilleja de la Cuesta near Seville, and Volga Hayworth, an American performer of Irish and English descent who had danced with the Ziegfeld Follies. Her paternal grandfather, Antonio Cansino, was a celebrated classical Spanish dancer credited with popularizing the bolero and ran a renowned dance school in Madrid; he gave her her first lessons. "From the time I was three and a half," she recalled, "as soon as I could stand on my own feet, I was given dance lessons." She trained daily at a studio complex near Carnegie Hall under her uncle Angel Cansino and, before she turned five, performed with the Four Cansinos in the Broadway production of *The Greenwich Village Follies*.

Tijuana and Two New Names

In 1931, when Hayworth was twelve, her father paired with her to form the "Dancing Cansinos." Because California law barred minors from performing in nightclubs, the act played across the border in Tijuana, her hair dyed black to look older and more overtly "Latin." Small film parts followed — *Cruz Diablo* (1934) and *In Caliente* (1935) — and Fox Film Corporation signed her as Rita Cansino, a contract that lapsed after Fox's merger into Twentieth Century Fox. Columbia's Harry Cohn signed her next but decided her Mediterranean look was limiting her casting; he had her take her mother's maiden name, dye her hair ginger red, and undergo electrolysis to raise her hairline — engineering, feature by feature, the star who would become Rita Hayworth.

Breakthrough

Cohn pushed director Howard Hawks to cast her opposite Cary Grant in *Only Angels Have Wings* (1939), and her career caught fire. She danced with Fred Astaire in *You'll Never Get Rich* (1941) and *You Were Never Lovelier* (1942); biographer Peter Levinson called their pairing "absolute magnetism on the screen." A 1941 pin-up photograph by *Life* photographer Bob Landry made her, alongside Betty Grable, one of the two most reproduced pin-ups of the Second World War. In *Cover Girl* (1944), dancing opposite Gene Kelly, she became one of only six women in film history to have danced on screen with both Kelly and Astaire — a distinction Hayworth herself prized above her fame, later saying, "I guess the only jewels of my life were the pictures I made with Fred Astaire... And Cover Girl, too."

Gilda

Her signature role arrived with *Gilda* (1946), a film noir opposite Glenn Ford in which she played a magnetic femme fatale and performed the celebrated "Put the Blame on Mame" number — a single-glove striptease so charged it drew the attention of censors and turned her into a lasting cultural icon. The following year, *The Lady from Shanghai* (1947), directed by her then-husband Orson Welles, drew strong reviews but weak box office, partly because Cohn objected to the platinum-blonde crop Welles had given her for the role. Her filmography through the 1940s and 1950s also included *Blood and Sand* (1941), *Tonight and Every Night* (1945), *The Loves of Carmen* (1948), *Affair in Trinidad* (1952), *Salome* (1953), and *Pal Joey* (1957), in which she again shared the screen with Kelly.

Five Marriages

Hayworth married five times over twenty-four years. Her first husband, the oilman and promoter Edward C. Judson, was twice her age and, by her account, controlling and financially exploitative; they divorced in 1942. She married Orson Welles in 1943; their daughter Rebecca was born in December 1944, and though Welles later admitted marriage "interfered with his freedom," the couple divorced amicably in 1947. In 1949 she married Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan III and heir to leadership of the Ismaili Muslim community; they had a daughter, Yasmin, but the marriage collapsed after Aly was seen dancing with actress Joan Fontaine, and Hayworth filed for divorce on grounds of "extreme cruelty, entirely mental in nature," rejecting a $1 million settlement offer rather than concede how their daughter would be raised. A brief, volatile marriage to singer Dick Haymes followed — he struck her in public at the Cocoanut Grove in 1955 — and her final marriage, to producer James Hill from 1958 to 1961, also ended badly; Charlton Heston later recalled witnessing Hill verbally abuse her at a dinner in Spain. Throughout, she maintained a long, intermittent relationship with Glenn Ford dating back to *Gilda*.

The Illness Beneath the Image

Hayworth once said, with unusual candor about her own public persona, "Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me." She struggled privately with shyness — "I naturally am very shy... and I suffer from an inferiority complex," she said in 1941 — and told Welles that her father had sexually abused her during their years touring as the Dancing Cansinos, a trauma her biographer Barbara Leaming linked to her later difficulties in relationships. For nearly two decades, heavy drinking masked what was actually the onset of early Alzheimer's disease; Welles recalled her flying into rages and driving recklessly through the Hollywood hills, and her daughter Yasmin later described "an alcoholic breakdown" that landed her mother in the hospital. In January 1976, Hayworth was removed from a TWA flight at Heathrow after an outburst, and a disheveled photograph made front pages the next day. She was formally diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in 1980, and by 1981 a Los Angeles court placed her in Yasmin's care in New York.

Why Rita Is Called a Genius

The claim for Hayworth is a physical-skill claim, not an intellectual one: her genius, such as the term applies, was dance technique built from early childhood under professional instruction and honed over a decade of screen partnership with the two greatest male dancers Hollywood produced. That is a narrow but real mastery — precise musicality, footwork, and screen chemistry that Astaire, who had no reason to flatter anyone, singled her out for above every other partner he ever had. It is not a claim about wit, invention, or intellectual range; Hayworth did not direct, write, or reshape her own image so much as have it engineered around her by studio executives, and her acting reputation rests more on charisma within a genre — noir seductress, musical lead — than on the interpretive breadth credited to contemporaries like Vivien Leigh. She was an exceptionally trained physical performer, not a polymath talent stretched across disciplines.

Legacy

Hayworth died on 14 May 1987 at her Manhattan home, aged sixty-eight, from complications of Alzheimer's disease. President Ronald Reagan issued a statement honoring her family's role in bringing public attention to the disease. She was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City after a funeral attended by Glenn Ford, Ricardo Montalbán, and Cesar Romero, her headstone reading, at Yasmin's choosing, "To yesterday's companionship and tomorrow's reunion." Medical historian Barron H. Lerner has called her the first public face of Alzheimer's, crediting her diagnosis with helping ensure future patients were not overlooked. The Rita Hayworth Gala, founded by Yasmin Aga Khan in 1985, has since raised more than $72 million for Alzheimer's research. The American Film Institute named her among the twenty-five greatest female stars in American film history, and her image endures well past her films — invoked by Madonna in "Vogue," and central to Stephen King's novella that became *The Shawshank Redemption*.

Achievements

• Notable work: Gilda
• Notable work: The Lady from Shanghai
• Notable work: Circus World
• Educated at Boys and Girls High School and Alexander Hamilton High School
• Worked as film actor, dancer and stage actor