Rita Hayworth was the most famous redhead in cinema. She was married five times and had to retire early suffering from Alzheimer's, but her legacy transcended decades and borders.
The name of the tonality is rare, almost unique, and singular. So much so that in its Wikipedia entry, the online and updated encyclopedia of all things, it only appears in three languages: English, Swedish, and Romanian. It is about “strawberry blonde”. A shade of hair color that is a combination of blonde and red. A subtle shade of hair that can appear blonde or brown in dim light, but turns pink in bright sunlight. Or almost red.
There are very, very few “strawberry blondes”. Some of the most dazzling on the big screen are Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams, and Christina Hendricks. But perhaps the most scarlet of all, the queen of the retinas of the collective unconscious of that pagan religion called cinema, was is and will be Rita Hayworth. Like some songs with her name (“A Rita” by Chico Buarque or “Lovely Rita” by The Beatles), Hayworth was enchanted at first sight. From an extensive filmography, her role in the classic Gilda would have been enough for her to never be forgotten. Her mouth, her legs, and, her hair were hinted at or already shown from the movie posters, always with titles designed for her eroticism (Blood and Sand or Los Amores de Carmen, for example). Rita set the audience on fire in the classic days of Hollywood.
The first Latina Hollywood actress?
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Margarita Carmen Cansino, on October 17, 2018. She was of Sephardic Jewish origin through her father, the Spanish and Sevillian dancer Eduardo Cansino Reina, and her mother, Volga Margaret Hayworth, was an American dancer who came from the theater and the world of Broadway musicals, which gave cinema and show business such fascinating, indomitable and disparate creatures Louise Brooks, Marion Davies, Paulette Goddard or Barbara Stanwyck.
She came to Hollywood as a dancer and as it became known long after her, her father, who from the age of 13 passed her off as her own wife, S- abused her. Before arriving at the mecca of cinema, she toured Mexico with her father, where she had to live in sordid environments of brothels, drug addiction, nightlife, and prostitution.
Her arrival in Hollywood came about through the Spanish Ballet of which she was a part, and it was thanks to the insistence of the Spanish consulate and having married producer Edward Judson (18 years her senior), that her career took an unexpected turn. Rita got a contract for the powerful studio Columbia Pictures.
She thus began as a secondary actress in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), by Howard Hawks. Her wide smile, both S- and naïve of her, her professional dancer physique, and her sunny reddish hair at the same time, captured the audience's attention instantly. All this allowed her to enter an even more important studio, 20th Century Fox, where she would finish cementing her career and international projection.
Over time and through the years of historicizing that great melting pot of universal cultures that is California, the question arose among researchers and moviegoers if Rita Hayworth faced a kind of Latino and minority avant-garde, due of course to her origin. But in reality, her career did not have, as in the case of Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno (Anita from West Side Story), Lucille Ball, or Dolores del Rio, an impact on the slight enthronement of the Latino world on the big screen. And yet, Rita was Latina despite her and her producers: an idea of exoticism and passion are the mark of her stellar step in the cinema.
Gilda, an Argentine film, and her marriage to Orson Welles
Already at 20th Century Fox, her most famous work would arrive: Gilda. Directed by Charles Vidor and co-starring Glenn Ford, it was the film that definitively catapulted her to fame. Even though it's in black and white, all the colors of Hayworth's eroticism daze on screen. It is a film noir, a genre in which basically the night, fatal women, and murders are the protagonists.
In the film, he performs the most subtle and dynamic striptease in history. A lesson in subtlety, off-screen, and imagination that consists of his character barely taking off a glove. A dance of S- and body for which the world was not prepared. Both this scene and the violent slapping that Glenn Ford gives her (who would be her lover for several years throughout their lives) caused public hysteria around the world. It is not only curious that a large part of the action of the film takes place in our country, but that, in all of her filmography, several titles by Rita allude to Argentina, such as Pampas Moon and Hi, Gaucho!. Hayworth was also Latina despite herself and her attempts to disguise her Iberian origin.
The movie was a hit. The social impact was such that the US government put an image of her in the atomic bomb tests that the Americans dropped on the Bikini Islands. Many argue that this is where the expression "bomb" comes from to refer popularly to a woman of striking beauty.
International fame follows with her second marriage. She marries the darling and feared child of Hollywood, Orson Welles. Together with Welles (with whom she had a daughter, Rebecca) she would star, already divorced from him, in another of the great black films of all time, The Lady from Shanghai. The last lines of the film are famous when the husband of Hayworth's character, Elsa Bannister, tells him before they both kill each other in a game of mirrors in an amusement park: “To kill you is to kill me Am the same. But you know what? I'm a little fed up with both of us."
Twilight of the diva and goddess of love
The one who was known as the goddess of love would have an ending that does not match her historical evocation. After also successful films such as Los Amores de Carmen (free adaptation of the opera) or Salomé, she began to have memory problems. At the end of the 60s, she hardly acted anymore: she began to show the first symptoms of Alzheimer's, a fact that of course made her unable to learn the scripts.
She died on May 14, 1987, at the age of 68 from Alzheimer's in her Manhattan apartment. Her funeral service was attended by, among others, Glenn Ford and Ricardo Montalbán. In Argentina, again that country that marked fiction in her career and a bit of her exotic myth, perhaps the biggest fan of the strawberry blonde, of the actress who could excite just by taking off a glove, has been the writer Manuel Puig. In a 1973 interview with journalist Felisa Pinto, the author said: “I think for me a Rita Hayworth dance expresses the joy of having a body. It expresses the triumph of life over death, the triumph of S- lived without guilt, lived with all the joy that the world has been forgetting through centuries of repression.
