Rita haworth biography movie

1983 television film directed by James Goldstone

Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess is a 1983 American made-for-televisionbiographical film directed by James Goldstone. Based on the 1977 biography Rita Hayworth by John Kobal, it deals with real events in the life of actress Rita Hayworth from 1931 to 1952. It was broadcast by CBS on November 2, 1983.

Plot

Under the direction of an abusive husband and against the wishes of her father, shy young dancer Rita Cansino rises to the top of Hollywood as Columbia Pictures contract player Rita Hayworth. Her confidence and boldness grows as she becomes one of the top movie actresses and "pinup girl" in the world. However, happiness continues elude her in unhappy marriages, alcoholism, and an intense, spiteful relationship under the studio's tyrannical leader Harry Cohn.

Historical inaccuracies

Although based on a biography, several other biographies about Hayworth's life released in subsequent years have expanded the details known of Hayworth's background that were available at the time of the film. In 1989, author Barbara Leaming released the authorized biography If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth after writing an authorized biography for her second husband Orson Welles. Hayworth's daughter Yasmin Aga Khan, former co-star Glenn Ford and his son Peter, and several others have also spoke of the difficulties Hayworth faced. As a result, several of the film's details have been rendered inaccurate from these revelations.

• The film portrays Hayworth as having a close relationship with her father, even allowing him to move in with her and Welles following her mother's death in 1945. However, Welles told Leaming that Hayworth had confided in him that her father had molested her as a child. He also claimed Hayworth would "fly into these rages, never at me... always at Harry Cohn or her father or her mother or her

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Margarita Carmen Cansino was born in Brooklyn on October 17, 1918. The world would come to worship her as the sex symbol Rita Hayworth, star of movies like Gilda, You Were Never Lovelier, and Separate Tables. But as Barbara Leaming writes in her heartbreaking 1989 biography If This Was Happiness, what happened to her as the child Margarita would scar Hayworth forever.

A magnificent dancer and entertainer, Hayworth lit up when performing. “She learned steps faster than anyone I’d ever known,” her costar Fred Astaire said, according to Leaming. “I’d show her a routine before lunch. She’d be back right after lunch and have it down to perfection. She apparently figured it out in her mind while she was eating.” Yet once the work was done, costar James Cagney remembered, she’d simply “go back to her chair and sit there and not communicate”—a possible indication of the trauma that lay beneath her glitzy persona.

Married five times, Hayworth would have affairs with Howard Hughes, Victor Mature, David Niven and Kirk Douglas. Yet she found little solace in her relationships: “Men go to bed with Gilda, but awaken with me,” Hayworth famously said once. “I felt something deep within her I couldn’t help—loneliness, sadness—something that would pull me down,” Douglas would recall after their tryst, according to Leaming. “I had to get away.”

But Hayworth could not escape her past or problems, run though she did. “You see what she was,” second husband Orson Welles told Leaming. “All her life was pain.”

Little Girl Lost

Eduardo Cansino, Hayworth’s Spanish-born father, had once been a smash on the vaudeville circuit, performing with his sister as the “Dancing Cansinos.” His daughter, according to her school principal, was “one of the kindest, most motherly girls I ever knew,” but a poor student. “She did the best she could, which wasn’t too good.”

But 12-year-old Hayworth could dance. According to Leaming, in 1931, a cash-strapped Cansino decided to revive the Dan

American actress, dancer, pin-up girl (1918–1987)

Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino; October 17, 1918 – May 14, 1987) was an American actress, dancer, and pin-up girl. She achieved fame in the 1940s as one of the top stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and appeared in 61 films in total over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth, after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.

Hayworth is widely known for her performance in the 1946 film noirGilda, opposite Glenn Ford, in which she played the femme fatale in her first major dramatic role. She is also known for her performances in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Blood and Sand (1941), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Pal Joey (1957), and Separate Tables (1958). Fred Astaire, with whom she made two films, You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), once called her his favorite dance partner. She also starred in the Technicolor musical Cover Girl (1944), with Gene Kelly. She is listed as one of the top 25 female motion picture stars of all time in the American Film Institute's survey, AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Hayworth received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1645 Vine Street in 1960.

In 1980, Hayworth was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which contributed to her death in 1987 at age 68. The public disclosure and discussion of her illness drew attention to Alzheimer's, and helped to increase public and private funding for research into the disease.

Early life