No 23

Rita Hayworth 1918-87

She was one of the world's most beautiful women and became an icon long before that word entered the lexicon of celebrity. Her image was inscribed on the first post-war atom bomb, tested in 1946 on the atoll that gave its name to the bikini. A poster for her most celebrated movie, the noir classic Gilda, was being put up on a wall in Rome by the hero of the Italian neo-realist film, Bicycle Thieves (1948), when his bike was stolen. In 1994, seven years after her death, Frank Darabont filmed Stephen King's novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, in which another Hayworth poster is used to cover the entrance to a prison escape; the convicts watch Gilda and cheer when, to her ageing husband's question, 'Gilda, are you decent?', Hayworth replies: 'Me? Decent?'

Yet while playing femme fatale roles, Carmen and Salome among them, she was always pure, kind, vulnerable and misunderstood. In the 1947 fantasy she played the goddess Terpsichore in the emblematically named film fantasy Down to Earth - emblematically, because she was constantly brought down and exploited by every man she met. Her first husband, Edward Judson, transformed her from the dark-haired Margarita Cansino (daughter of a celebrated Spanish-born dancer and his American stage partner) into the ravishing red-blond Rita Hayworth. The brutal, manipulative Harry Cohn made her the top star of his Columbia studio. Orson Welles, her second husband, sought to restore his fortunes by directing her in the misogynistic The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Millionaire playboy Aly Khan made her his trophy wife, took her away from the cinema for four years and left her penniless. The singer Dick Haymes, her fourth husband, thought she'd revive his career and protect him from deportation to Argentina.

After 30 movies, mostly B-pictures, she became a minor star in Howard Hawks's classic Only Angels Have Wings (1940), then a major star a year later in Mamoulian's Blood and Sand, where she proved a gift to Technicolor as the Spanish socialite who leads matador Tyrone Power astray. She gained a reputation in Hollywood for her hard work, dedication and lack of false pride while working in two musicals with Fred Astaire (who thought her a better dancing partner than her cousin, Ginger Rogers) and Gene Kelly, who appeared with her in the seminal Cover Girl (1944).

Gilda (1946) was the high point of her career and she attempted to reprise it with the merely passable Affair in Trinidad, which reunited her with Glenn Ford, when she returned to Hollywood after her divorce from Khan. She appeared in a couple of decent pictures thereafter - as Burt Lancaster's ex-wife in Separate Tables, and as another innocent temptress, playing opposite an ailing Gary Cooper in Robert Rossen's underrated They Came to Cordura (1959). But her career tragically petered out with poor movies and finally Alzheimer's, initially and tragically misdiagnosed as alcoholism.

Hayworth on Hayworth 'Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me.'

Her greatest line 'If I'd been a ranch they'd have named me the Bar Nothing' (Gilda)

Essential DVDs Only Angels Have Wings, The Strawberry Blonde, Cover Girl, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai

Next week: Dick Powell