Margarita Carmen Cansino was born in 1918, two years before the U.S. Congress ratified the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed women to vote in national elections. Her father was from Spain and her mother a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. Her "foreign" heritage was not an advantage during her years in film and when she was put under contract to Columbia studios they lightened her dark tresses to auburn and shed her Latin name, changing it to Rita Hayworth.
She was a girl who never had time to finish school and who was drafted to dance with her father in Tijuana dives at the age of twelve. Insecure and shy, uneducated and easily manipulated she was continually used by men who saw only her sex appeal and beauty and none of the vulnerability the lie beneath the surface.
Like so many Hollywood women of her era, the very stardom she sought became a curse she alternately clung to and tried to shed.
When she died in the care of her daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, at the age of 68, the fawning lovers and users were gone. But in one of the many ironies of life, her death from Alzheimer's was the beginning of a new awareness of this terrible disease. Her daughter Yasmin took up the cause. Click on the headline above for my blog on how this victim and star left a legacy of which she could be very proud.
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