Before She Died Rita Hayworth Confessed the Secret Behind Her 5 Marriages

Rita Hayworth was married five times to some of the most powerful men of her era, but in 1981 she confessed to her daughter that she had never truly been in love with any of them. What she revealed was darker: she had been chasing the feeling of being wanted, hoping each husband would see past the screen goddess and love the woman underneath. This video walks through each marriage in order, from Edward Judson who remade 18-year-old Margarita Cansino into Rita Hayworth in 1937, to Orson Welles in 1943, Prince Aly Khan in 1949, Dick Haymes in 1953, and producer James Hill in 1958. Every divorce made headlines, but the real story was what Hollywood had done to her before the first marriage ever began. The studio erased Margarita through painful electrolysis, hair dye, and a name change, building an image that made her the most photographed woman in the world and left her invisible in her own life. By the late 1960s, Rita was showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, though it would not be publicly diagnosed until 1980. The memory loss that destroyed her final marriage and ended her career was the same disease that would take her life in 1987. Her daughter Yasmin became her caregiver and later raised over $750.00 million for Alzheimer's research in her mother's name, making sure the world remembered the woman, not just the icon.