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Her real inner emotional feeling seems to overflow the role. It was not a quality which made her a Box Office star throughout the 1940s, in comparison to other Hollywood actresses such as Betty Grable, Judy Garland, Esther Williams, and Claudette Colbert; yet, today, Hayworth holds a special place they do not as a legend of Hollywood.
The reason for this is Hayworth’s magnetic, suave, real-life presence as a photographic model, dancer, and witty comedienne, which she once described herself as more than an actress. These are qualities which made her sensual photos and pinups popularized through Screen Star magazines of the times, an inspiration to American and Allied troops during World War 11, and for civilian young women who connected with Hayworth’s extroverted skill at reflecting the environment, of both the natural and recreational social world.
Adventurous spirit
As said before, Hayworth’s best screen debut in ‘ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS’ of 1939, which took her to South America, also signalled her outdoor adventurous spirit which would continue throughout her career, at least up to Robert Rossen’s ‘THEY CAME TO CORDURA’ of 1959, where Hayworth delivers that psychological act of pacifying and disarming male villainy with sexual gratification.
In 1946, she would come back to South America, filming ‘GILDA’, one of her most popular films, in Buenos Aires, under the direction of Charles Vidor, with whom she often worked.
‘Gilda’, listed as a Film Noir, helped Hayworth’s popularity as a dancer and singer soar, while playing with her image as a ‘femme fatale’. It was an image her bosses at Columbia Pictures were not very pleased with, and the film was shelved for two years before public release.
Hayworth could not care less, because the film was also a concocted publicity stunt for her packaged beauty, a good one at that, which she could afford to do because of her extra real-life ability to live her life to the fullest.
Hayworth’s real life
In Hayworth’s real life, there was some truth to her way with men, since she had more lovers or husbands than even Elizabeth Taylor. Unlike today’s female freedom without stigma, marriage in the 1940s and 50s legitimized a woman’s sexual freedom. There is also a more astute intelligent side to such a liberated lifestyle that is often overlooked, which suggests that the act of changing intimate male partners after a year or two, or even months, meant one was receiving new experiences, new knowledge from those men one chose.
Hayworth was no airhead; her marriages included intellectuals like Orson Welles, who, in fact, had her star in one of her more serious films he directed, ‘THE LADY FROM SHANGAI’ of 1948, in which he cast her as a scheming back-stabbing beauty, which probably appeased his own vulnerability to her feminine charm, since she made their marriage a brief affair.
Hollywood, south of the border
It is from 1952 onwards that Rita Hayworth began to leave photographic evidence of a hedonistic life in the tropics. This began with ‘AFFAIR IN TRINIDAD’, where, with her co-star, Glenn Ford, the tropical lushness and southern architecture of Trinidad became the backdrop for an intriguing woman on the run.
The next year, 1953, saw her in ‘SALOME’, apt for her display of sensual dancing in Eastern costume. Later in her real life, she would marry an Arab Prince, again briefly. But 1956 saw her glorious and famous return to Port-of-Spain and the beaches of Trinidad to film ‘FIRE DOWN BELOW’, where her role is that of a drifting woman who comes between the friendship of two seamen, played by Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon.
This was the decade when Hollywood colour films gave the Caribbean and South America a worldwide positive boost, with other film productions like ‘ISLAND IN THE SUN’ with Dorothy Dandridge, filmed in Jamaica; ‘THE NAKED JUNGLE’ with Charleston Heston, filmed in Brazil; ‘GREEN MANSIONS’ with Audrey Hepburn, filmed in British Guiana, Venezuela, and Columbia; and ‘MARACAIBO’, with Cornel Wilde, filmed in Venezuela.
Photographic legacy
Hayworth’s scenes in ‘Fire Down Below’, such as her dancing the Limbo barefoot of the streets of Port-of Spain (there is a sound track album for the film), sampling a slice of melon on the street with Jack Lemmon, walking with her suitcase in the capital, dining outdoors, her mouth caught full in normal conversation, dipping her toes in beach surf, playing ping pong, riding her bicycle, reading hard cover books, relaxing in the shade of palm trees, etc, all this captures and communicates a zest for living that goes beyond the fantasy of screen roles and privileged lives associated with celebrated film stars. Rita Hayworth’s photographic memorabilia preserves that vital energy of living for others to be inspired by. Her artistic worth is not confined to her films, like so many other actresses. Dancing certainly helped to further this, but if we need one ultimate proof of Hayworth’s famous body language, there is that amazing mobile scene of her walking rapidly, throwing out the back of her hair with both hands while swinging her shoulders suavely as she strides forward. Nothing about her last years with Altzeimer’s disease, before her death at 68, can cancel the fact that she turned the world on positively, like sunrise and sunset.
