Wild Irish Women: Rita Hayworth, the Ravishing and Ravished Redhead irishamerica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishamerica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Stacker compiled a list of moments in Rita Hayworth s life you may not know about, drawing from news accounts, biographies, interviews, and movie databases.
Rita Hayworth, original name Margarita Carmen Cansino, (born October 17, 1918, Brooklyn, New York, U.S. died May 14, 1987, New York, New York), American film actress and dancer who rose to glamorous stardom in the 1940s and ’50s. Hayworth was the daughter of Spanish-born dancer Eduardo Cansino and his partner, Volga Hayworth, and, as a child, she performed in her parents’ nightclub act. While still a teenager, she caught the attention of a Hollywood producer, and in the mid-1930s she began appearing in films, using her given name of Rita Cansino, starting with Under the Pampas Moon (1935). Movies from this
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Her mother, the improbably named Volga, was an ex-Ziegfeld Girl, born to a printer, Allynn Hayworth, and his wife, Maggie O’Hare, the daughter of Patrick and Bridget O’Hare, immigrants from Ireland. Her father, Eduardo Cansino, as black-hearted a villain as ever lived (saving a few of her husbands), was an exotic Spanish dancer and son of the man who introduced a sensuous dance, the Bolero, to Americans. Her parents settled into a humble Brooklyn apartment where she was born in 1918. Volga wanted to name her daughter Margaret after her mother, but Eduardo insisted on Carmen. They compromised, probably for the only time, and named the baby Margarita Carmen. Years later, Margarita shortened her first name, took her mother’s maiden name and became, arguably, the most glamorous woman who ever lived, Rita Hayworth.