17 October: Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth, US actress, was born on this date in 1918. Here are 10 things you might not know about her:

1. Her real name was Margarita Carmen Cansino. Hayworth was her mother’s maiden name. Volga Hayworth had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies.

2. Her father, Eduardo, was determined that Rita should become a dancer. He made her take dancing lessons from an early age and spend most of her spare time practising. As a child, she wasn’t keen on dancing but was too afraid of her father to say so. Her first film appearance was at the age of eight with her father’s dance troupe in a short black and white film called La Fiesta.

3. When she was 12, her violent and abusive father decided to take her out of school and make her his dance partner. He made her up to look much older, and got around the fact she was too young to be working in the US by taking her Tijuana, Mexico.

4. There’s a legend which says the Margarita cocktail was named after her during the time she was dancing with her father in Mexico using her real name. There’s no proof this is true.

5. She was quite literally a bombshell. Her image and the name “Gilda” (one of her movies) was glued onto the case of an atom bomb dropped on the Bikini Atoll during a test in 1946. According to then-husband Orson Welles, Hayworth was furious about it.

6. She was a cousin by marriage to Ginger Rogers.

7. One of the prisoners in Shawshank Redemption has a poster of her on his cell wall.

8. Her love life was tumultuous. She married five times. At 18 she married Edward C. Judson, a movie promoter twice her age. He helped establish her career but also pocketed most of her earnings. Her second husband was Orson Welles with whom she had a daughter, Rebecca. However, the marriage failed because he’d fallen in love with her film personas rather than the real woman with baggage and scars. Her third husband was Prince Aly Khan, who she met at Cannes Film Festival in 1948. Hayworth left Hollywood and sailed for France, breaking her contract with Columbia. The couple had a daughter, Yasmin, but the marriage was deemed "illicit" by Pope Pius XII as Hayworth was a Catholic. Prince Aly didn’t give up his philandering ways so that marriage ended, too. Both her fourth and fifth husbands, Dick Haymes and James Hill were abusive. Hayworth left Haymes after he slapped her face in public, and actor Charlton Heston wrote that he and his wife had an embarrassing dinner with Hayworth and Hill in which Hayworth was reduced to tears by her husband. Heston and his wife walked out, and he says this is one of his biggest regrets, that he walked away from Hayworth in her hour of need.

9. In the movie Gilda, while filming a fight scene with co-star Glenn Ford, she knocked out two of his teeth.

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

Character birthdays

Amethyste and Swallow, twin princesses from Classica, Innovia.

Swallow was the eldest and in line for the throne; Amethyste was jealous and schemed to kill her sister. They were both pulled through the wormhole caused by a nuclear test at Bird Island, after their father made them go on a pilgrimage there in an attempt to get them to settle their differences; but ended up in different places and times. Amethyste became the lover of Desi Troyes (Destroyer) and hence one of the arch enemies of the Raiders. Swallow set out to find the rest of her party, but was rescued and taken in by Fixer, and joined Combat Team Gamma.