Rita Hayworth, a shy Spanish dancer who was transformed into the titian-haired movie "love goddess" of the 1940s only to rebel against the studio system that created her, has died in New York City, it was reported Friday.
Miss Hayworth, a victim of Alzheimer's disease that robbed her of speech and memory during the last years of her life, died Thursday night at the home of Princess Yasmin Khan Embiricos, her daughter from her storybook marriage to Prince Aly Khan.
Yasmin said her mother was 69 but film biographies listed her age as 68.
The death came just three days after the second annual "Rita Hayworth Gala," a glittering, black-tie affair at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel hosted by her daughter that raised $1.3 million for the Alzheimer's Disease Society.
Monday Services Set
Funeral services were scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday at the Roman Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. Burial will follow at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.
Miss Hayworth's glamour was such that during World War II she was second only to Betty Grable as the GIs' favorite pinup. Columnists wrote that she was the woman Technicolor was invented for. She was on the cover of Life magazine four times, a record equalled only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her picture was pasted on the first atomic bomb exploded in peacetime, on Bikini atoll in 1946.
By 1949, Miss Hayworth was one of Hollywood's highest-paid actresses--earning more than $375,000 a year. She was also a real-life princess, the wife of Aly Khan, whose father was the spiritual leader of 9 million Ismaili Muslims.
But only two years later, her marriage in shambles, she was alone with two children and running out of money. In order to travel with her husband, she had defied demands by Columbia studios boss Harry Cohn that she report for work. He suspended her and sued for breach of contract.
"I was really in deep slavery," she said later of her tenure at Columbia, adding that she was suspended so many times for refusing roles that she lost count. She insisted that Cohn had her dressing room bugged and made her punch a time clock even though she was his biggest star. But Cohn said he only wanted her to do her job.
Miss Hayworth professed to despise the roles she was assigned there--the vivacious beauty and saucy seductress. And it was not until she left Columbia and began to age that she gained recognition from critics as a serious actress in such independent films as "Separate Tables" in 1958, in which she was praised for her sensitive portrayal of a tormenting wife, and "They Came to Cordura," a 1959 drama that cast her as a prisoner being transported across the desert.
37-Year Career
During a 37-year career, she made 61 films--about half of them before she achieved stardom in 1941 in the light musical, "You'll Never Get Rich," with Fred Astaire. They included "Blood and Sand," "Tales of Manhattan," "Cover Girl," "Gilda" (the seductive siren who became her film signature), "The Lady from Shanghai," "Salome," "Miss Sadie Thompson," "Pal Joey," "The Story on Page One" and "The Money Trap." Her last film was "The Wrath of God" in 1972.
With an exuberant beauty that came alive before the cameras, Miss Hayworth was ideal for the Hollywood system that manufactured stars through grooming, publicity and carefully planned buildups.
"She was a real creature of the movies, possessing the quality of involving the audience in her problem, like all the greatest stars," director George Cukor once said of Miss Hayworth.
Rouben Mamoulian, her director in "Blood and Sand," once said: "She made you believe in both her beauty and her ability whenever she was on the screen."
Miss Hayworth had five husbands, including Orson Welles, singer Dick Haymes and Khan. She said her marriages failed because no man would give her what she really wanted--a quiet home life. She once explained the problem by saying, "Every man I knew had fallen in love with Gilda and wakened with me."
Feeling Imprisoned
In the 1960s, interviewers painted a picture of Miss Hayworth as a sporadically employed movie star, living in her Beverly Hills mansion and feeling imprisoned by the image Hollywood had given her. "I'm an actress," she told one reporter. "I have depth. I have feeling. But they don't care. All they want is an image."
Stardom could never mask the nervous insecurity that followed Miss Hayworth all of her life. Early in her career, she began having a drink to relax before her scenes and by the late 1970s, reports of her supposed alcoholism were widespread.
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