Rita Hayworth

The couple married in 1917.

They also had two sons: Eduardo Jr. and Vernon.

Her maternal uncle Vinton Hayworth was also an actor.

Margarita's father wanted her to become a professional dancer, while her mother hoped that she would become an actress.

Her paternal grandfather, Antonio Cansino, was renowned as a classical Spanish dancer.

He popularized the bolero, and his dancing school in Madrid was world-famous.

Antonio Cansino instructed Rita Hayworth's first dance lesson.

Hayworth later recalled, "From the time I was three and a half ... as soon as I could stand on my own feet, I was given dance lessons."

She noted "I didn't like it very much ... but I didn't have the courage to tell my father, so I began taking the lessons. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, that was my girlhood."

She attended dance classes every day for a few years in a Carnegie Hall complex, where she was taught by her uncle Angel Cansino.

Before her fifth birthday she was one of the Four Cansinos featured in the Broadway production of The Greenwich Village Follies at the Winter Garden Theatre.

Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino; October 17, 1918 – May 14, 1987) was an American actress.

In 1926, at the age of eight, she was featured in La Fiesta, a short film for Warner Bros.

In 1927, her father took the family to Hollywood.

He believed that dancing could be featured in the movies and that his family could be part of it.

He established his own dance studio, where he taught such stars as James Cagney and Jean Harlow.

In the early 1930s, it was a popular tourist spot for people from Los Angeles.

Because she was working, Cansino never graduated from high school, but she completed the ninth grade at Hamilton High in Los Angeles.

In 1931, Eduardo Cansino partnered with his 12-year-old daughter to form an act called the Dancing Cansinos.

Her hair was dyed from brown to black to give her a more mature and "Latin" appearance.

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.

Cansino (Hayworth) took a bit part in the film Cruz Diablo (1934) at age 16, which led to another bit part in the film In Caliente (1935) with the Mexican actress Dolores del Río.

She danced with her father in such nightspots as the Foreign and the Caliente clubs.

Winfield Sheehan, the head of the Fox Film Corporation, saw her dancing at the Caliente Club and quickly arranged for Hayworth to do a screen test a week later.

Impressed by her screen persona, Sheehan signed her to a six-month contract at Fox under the name Rita Cansino, the first of two name changes during her film career.

During her time at Fox, Hayworth was billed as Rita Cansino and appeared in unremarkable roles, often cast as the exotic foreigner.

In late 1934, aged 16, she performed a dance sequence in the Spencer Tracy film Dante's Inferno (1935), and was put under contract in February 1935.

She is also known for her performances in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Strawberry Blonde (1941), Blood and Sand (1941), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Pal Joey (1957), and Separate Tables (1958).

She achieved fame in the 1940s as one of the top stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and appeared in 61 films in total over 37 years.

The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s.

She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.

Fred Astaire, with whom she made two films, You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), once called her his favorite dance partner.

She also starred in the Technicolor musical Cover Girl (1944), with Gene Kelly.

She is listed as one of the top 25 female motion picture stars of all time in the American Film Institute's survey, AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars.

Hayworth is perhaps best known for her performance in the 1946 film noir Gilda, opposite Glenn Ford, in which she played the femme fatale in her first major dramatic role.

In 1980, Hayworth was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, which contributed to her death in 1987 at age 68.

The public disclosure and discussion of her illness drew attention to Alzheimer's, and helped to increase public and private funding for research into the disease.

Hayworth was born as Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn, New York, the oldest child of two dancers.

Her father, Eduardo Cansino, was of Spanish Roma/Gitano descent from Castilleja de la Cuesta, a little town near Seville, Spain.

Her mother, Volga Hayworth, was an American of Irish and English descent who had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies.