Saturdays with the Stars: Rita Hayworth

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Lena Horne, a gorgeous actress and singer whose career was stifled by the racism of Hollywood in the 1940's.  This month we'll move on to an actress who definitely dominated the decade, but perhaps is best known for her unspoken role in a film some fifty years after her heyday, a role that introduced your blogger host to the concept of a "sex symbol" in the first place.  This month's star is Rita Hayworth.

Rita was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, the child of two dancers.  Hayworth had a horrendous childhood, being repeatedly sexually abused by her father (her mother would sleep in the same bed as her daughter in hopes that the abuse would stop, but it didn't), who was her dance partner throughout much of her teen years as they had a nightclub act in Tijuana.  She began working in films as a teenager, first at Fox and then at Columbia.  It was here that she found success, though not at first.  It wasn't until 1941, with the release of The Strawberry Blonde and You'll Never Get Rich (with Fred Astaire), that Hayworth graduated from budding potential to a household name.

Hayworth would enjoy enormous success throughout the 1940's, not only as a movie star for Columbia, but also as a pinup girl, rivaling Betty Grable for the best-selling pinup poster of World War II.  Hayworth's life was always tragic, though, as her love life resulted in five husbands (including Orson Welles and Aly Khan, the latter of whom made her briefly a princess), as well as a long-running affair with actor Glenn Ford.  Several of her husbands physically and emotionally abused her (though, for the record, this is not an accusation levied at Welles), and Hayworth struggled her whole life with depression and alcoholism.  She died at the age of 68 due to complications from Alzheimer's Disease, an illness that she helped bring into the public consciousness after it had mostly just been whispered about beforehand (it was considered a "shameful" disease).

Hayworth brings a unique challenge to me for this series.  Last season, and so far this season, we have profiled actresses whose career I am familiar with, but who by-and-large I hadn't seen most of their most important films before we investigated them for the month; this isn't the case for Rita Hayworth.  Hayworth, in fact, is one of my all-time favorite actresses, and not only have I seen many of her films, we've profiled them here; I linked Strawberry Blonde up above, but there's also Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai on this blog already, her two most important pictures.  I could have precluded her from the series, but for a lot of people, the concept of Rita Hayworth as a Hollywood sex symbol is indisputable, particularly after her pinup poster's central role in The Shawshank Redemption (the movie that brought Hayworth's name to a new generation, including me), so leaving her out felt preposterous.  Luckily, Hayworth had a long and interesting career (including multiple rounds at Columbia), so we'll be filling out some of my gaps in her filmography, but I wanted to be forthright with you here that I am not going into Hayworth's month with an open mind-instead, what I hope to find is more information about some of the earlier and later chapters of her career, and why she wasn't considered a more respected actress in her day despite immense talent.