FYI
Rita Hayworth was born in
Brooklyn,
New York in 1918 as
Margarita Carmen Cansino, the oldest child of two dancers,
Eduardo Cansino, Sr., from
Castilleja de la Cuesta, a little town near
Seville,
Spain,
[3] and
Volga Hayworth, an American of Irish-English descent who had performed with the
Ziegfeld Follies.
Eduardo partnered with his daughter to form "The Dancing Cansinos". Since under California law, Margarita was too young to work in nightclubs and bars, her father took her with him to work across the border in
Tijuana,
Mexico. In the early 1930s, it was a popular tourist spot for people from Los Angeles.
[4] Due to her working, Cansino never graduated from high school; she completed ninth grade at Hamilton High in Los Angeles.
Hayworth's alcoholism hid symptoms of what was eventually understood to be
Alzheimer's disease. "For several years in the 1970s, she had been misdiagnosed as an alcoholic."
[48] "It was the outbursts," said her daughter, "She'd fly into a rage. I can't tell you. I thought it was alcoholism-alcoholic dementia. We all thought that. The papers picked that up, of course. You can't imagine the relief just in getting a diagnosis. We had a name at last, Alzheimer's! Of course, that didn't really come until the last seven or eight years. She wasn't diagnosed as having Alzheimer's until 1980. There were two decades of hell before that."
Rita Hayworth "Staying Alive"
Elegance can be Sexy too!
