Hollywood's Love Goddess started life as Margarita Cansino, a Spanish dancer's daughter
Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, granddaughter of the man who popularised the bolero. Studios dyed her hair, renamed her twice and cast her as every kind of exotic foreigner before Gilda made her a legend. Her later illness helped put Alzheimer's disease on the public agenda.
She was born in Manhattan on October 17, 1918, the eldest of three children of two dancers. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, came from a town near Seville; her mother, of Irish and English descent, had danced with the Ziegfeld Follies. Grandfather Antonio Cansino ran a celebrated dance school in Madrid and gave the little girl her first lesson. She remembered starting at about three and a half and not much enjoying it, but she was too afraid to tell her father. Before turning five she was on Broadway with the family troupe.
The family moved to Hollywood in 1927, where Eduardo opened a studio and taught stars such as James Cagney. In 1931 he paired with his 12-year-old daughter as the Dancing Cansinos, dyeing her brown hair black to make her look older. California law kept her out of nightclubs, so they performed across the border in Tijuana, and she never finished high school. The head of Fox saw her dance at the Caliente Club and signed her as Rita Cansino.
Fox mostly cast her as foreigners: an Argentinian girl, an Egyptian, a Russian dancer. When Fox merged into 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck let her contract lapse. The promoter Edward Judson, whom she married in 1937, found her freelance work, and Harry Cohn at Columbia signed her for seven years. The surname she finally took, Hayworth, was her mother's family name, shared with an actor uncle, Vinton.
The 1940s made her a top star. She danced in two films with Fred Astaire, who called her his favourite partner, and in 1946 played the femme fatale in Gilda opposite Glenn Ford. She was the second most popular pin-up among American servicemen in the Second World War, behind Betty Grable, and made 61 films across 38 years. Diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in 1980, she died on May 14, 1987, aged 68, and the public discussion of her case helped raise research funding for the disease.
Source: Rita Hayworth
