9/4/2023 0 Comments Astaire hayworth movies![]() What’s most remarkable about this transformation isn’t how blatantly racist it is. Cansino went into seclusion, underwent extensive hairline electrolysis, dyed her hair flaming red, and re-emerged as Rita Hayworth. How do you de-Latinize a beautiful woman? Take away her widow’s peak. But to turn Cansino into such a star, drastic measures were apparently necessary. Columbia wanted a new star - someone to rival MGM’s glamour. Columbia signed her to a seven-year contract, but Consuelo spent her first months with the studio typecast as sultry, dancing (bit-part) Latinas. Judson helped land Consuelo a string of bit parts, eventually winning her a screen test with Columbia Pictures in 1937. At all of 18, she eloped to Vegas with Edward Judson, a businessman-turned-talent-manager as old as her father. ![]() She appeared in very small parts in a number of very small films, and at the end of her six month contract, Fox unceremoniously let her go. And it was in one of these Tijuana nightclubs that Hayworth was spotted by a talent scout for Fox Studios, who quickly signed her, under the name Rita Consuelo, to a six-month contract.īut Consuelo was nothing special, at least not yet. But Eduardo Cansino had a plan: he would make Rita his dance partner, and they could go dance in Tijuana clubs as “The Dancing Cansinos.” Nevermind that this arrangement suggested Rita to be her father’s wife - the pair was a HUGE HIT. But the Depression tightened belts both in and outside of Hollywood, and dance instruction was one of the first luxuries to go. Her family moved to Hollywood when she was eight, and her father began giving personal lessons to big studio stars. Think ’30s version of a Pussycat Doll.) Margarita’s grandfather had been a HUGE DEAL in Spanish dancing - he brought the bolero to American audiences - and it was he who gave Hayworth her first dance lesson at age three.įrom then on, Hayworth was in constant dance training. Her father, Eduardo, was a Spanish dancer her mother, Volga, had been a Ziegfield girl. Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino, in Brooklyn, to two showbiz parents. But the lustre of royalty did not last, and Hayworth moved on: to a string of moderate hits, to more husbands, to relative obscurity.īut for a brief period in the late ’40s, she was the closest thing America had to a Cinderella. She had endured a life of transformation and heartbreak, all of it very much in the public eye, and so there were things that audiences wanted for her - happiness, a family, princess-dom - that made them willing to forgive pesky technicalities. And Hayworth’s man was not only not her husband - he wasn’t even Christian! HE WAS A ‘MOSLEM’! FROM ARABIA! (I am not making these words up - they were in the gossip columns.)īut because this man was a prince, and Hayworth would (hopefully, fingers crossed, please don’t show as pregnant before this happens) be made a princess, it was somehow forgivable. But Hayworth also managed to galavant across the globe in the 1940s with a man who was not her husband - at the exact time when Ingrid Bergman was busy being denounced on the Senate floor as an “instrument of evil” for doing the same thing. ![]() ![]() What sets her apart is the alacrity in her eyes, the persistent bounce in her step - when you see her onscreen, it seems like everyone else is just sleepwalking.īut Hayworth’s story is also a tragic one: in addition to undergoing a very public and very graphic (and very literal) erasure of her heritage, she also endured mental abuse and manipulation at the hands of multiple men. ![]() She’s gorgeous, but so are many classic Hollywood stars. This little girl from Brooklyn, exploited at the hands of her domineering father, forced to change her name and her hairline to get rid of her pesky Latinness, had the sort of beauty and verve that unite to form charisma. ![]()
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