n Rita Hayworth, the radiantly beautiful GI pinup of the 1940s, paid a high price for her Hollywood success: she died of Alzheimer's Disease in 1987, having been totally unable to remember her past triumphs during her last few years. It was a cruel twist of fate for Hayworth who, despite her international stardom and popularity, had not led a happy life and would have been entitled to expect to bask in her former glories in her old age.
n The Latin beauty was born not in Buenos Aires, but in Brooklyn, to professional dancers, in 1918. The young Margarita Carmen Cansino was goaded into dancing lessons by her ambitious father and, by the age of 17, was working in Hollywood nightclubs, where she was spotted and signed up by an executive from Twentieth Century-Fox. For the next few years, she turned up as an exotic dancer in various Fox movies.
n In the late 1930s Hayworth continued to hone her acting skills in B-movies, but was by now hellbent on becoming a star, proving her determination by losing a significant amount of weight, raising her hairline, and taking elocution lessons. Her efforts impressed boorish Columbia president Harry Cohn, who gave her the chance to show what she could do in the Cary Grant-Jean Arthur adventure Only Angels Have Wings (1939).
n Hayworth's first leading role was in the offbeat fantasy Angels Over Broadway (1940), but Cohn was only really convinced of her worth after he had lent her out to other studios, most notably Warners, for whom she dyed her raven hair red to star as The Strawberry Blonde alongside James Cagney. Thereafter, she lit up the screen in various musicals (in which her singing was dubbed), the sultry film noir Gilda (1946), and The Lady From Shanghai (1948), written and directed by her former husband, Orson Welles.
Rita Hayworth stars in My Gal Sal (C4 1.40pm) and other films each afternoon this week on C4.
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