“Rita” by Beatrice Brandini
Rita Hayworth in Gilda
Rita Hayworth will be held at the Cineteca Milano MIC (Interactive Museum of Cinema) from 27 December. The Lady of Hollywood, a tribute to one of the greatest icons in the history of American cinema.
Poster for the film You’ll Never Get Rich, 1941
8 titles on the calendar to retrace the brilliant career of Rita Hayworth, a journey marked by important collaborations with directors such as Charles Vidor (Gilda and Fascino), Orson Welles (The Lady from Shanghai) and others, who consecrated her as the undisputed diva of the golden age of cinema.
Poster Gilda, 1946
The great success came precisely with the film Gilda, despite the fact that Hayworth already had thirty-one films to her credit and collaborations with directors and actors of the caliber of Glenn Ford, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Ben Hecht…, she did not have global fame still achieved. Soon she will become for all her Gilda, indeed, more, Gilda the atomic bomb.
Poster My Gal Sal, 1942
Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino), daughter of a Spanish dancer and an actress of Irish origins, from an early age her father taught her to dance just to follow him in her traveling shows .
In fact, it will be her innate grace, her knowledge of dance and her beautiful voice that will allow her to successfully venture into the world of musicals, in which she makes her debut.
Poster The Lady from Shanghai, 1947
But personality and beauty will place her on another level, completely separating her from the actresses who have appeared on the screen up to now, Rita imposes herself as a model of a sensual and explosive woman (legend has it that her photo in which she played Gilda was placed on the first bomb atomic bomb, tested in Bikini Atoll), even though in reality she was a woman who throughout her life sought only love.
Poster Affair in Trinidad, 1952
Her modest striptease in Gilda made the spectators of the whole world dream, but at the same time it also became a “trap”. In fact, she will say: “They sleep with Gilda and wake up with me”. That dance in which she sensually takes off a glove, shaking her unforgettable red hair, has become a symbolic as well as iconic sequence. “I’m not very good with zippers, but maybe if i had some help…”
Poster Salomè, 1953
The actress died in 1987 at the age of 69, placed 19th among the major film stars worldwide. Hayworth was actually long forgotten and snubbed, after the mid-fifties she was only assigned secondary parts and very often of alcoholic women; her indomitable character, her emotional instability were branded as consequences of alcohol addiction, in reality the mood swings and memory lapses had very different origins, those of a disease diagnosed only at the end, namely the terrible Alzheimers.
Rita Hayworth
Ciao Rita, you were one of the women who made me dream since I was a child (I have dozens of biographies about you); you were beautiful, good, talented, strong and independent (memorable interpretation of the dark lady in The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles). This is what remains and will always remain of you.
Good life to everyone!
Beatrice