40sFilmFan

Somebody once said on YouTube she would look like a punk (in a positive way) as Elsa Bannister. You know, back in the day people were so shocked with Rita's short blonde hair but I think she looks absolutely beautiful with it! It added a new look, a new side to her image which I find very complex in general: dancer, starlet, girl next door, pin up girl, cover girl, femme fatale, love goddess, princess, mother,...

No, she doesn't mind you

Yeah, Rita looked gorgeous with any haircolour!

I'm not so sure whether Rita said those three things. It's the first time that I come across them. And I think, I or some other fans would have stumbled upon them elsewhere, especially upon the quote about Marilyn and her saying that she didn't mind being Mexican because she speaks Spanish. She did love Mexico but in other sources Rita always said very modestly that her Spanish would only be "passable." And using the word "hell" sounds also very unusual to me - Rita didn't use an earthy language. If a Mexican added that to Wikipedia, I wouldn't be surprised, hahaha. However, the others are very familiar to me.

Wonderful pictures, Marlen! Thank you for sharing!

Don't worry, this terrible story about her father abusing her from this scandalous Leaming bio from 1989 is MOST UNLIKELY to be true. And I personally don't believe it one bit! Her father was strict, yes, in fact, both her parents were strict Catholics. Rita's daughter Yasmin said in an interview that he demanded "blood" from Rita, that she would always have to give her very best while dancing. But that doesn't mean that these incest claims have any ground. Leaming's bio is awfully written in general, it's full of pseudo psychology and very repetitive. She bases her claims on Orson Welles revealing her this "secret" during an interview for the bio she was writing about him - but if I remember correctly, she doesn't even quote him in her Rita bio, she only writes that "he told me that Rita was abused by her father" or something like that. And there is no mentioning of it in her Welles bio which came out while Rita and Orson were still alive while her Rita bio came out after both had died. It's even rumoured that Leaming's original script was way different from the final result but that the publisher wanted her to rewrite the book in order to make it more scandalous - in other words: to make big cash $$$. Even if it were true I doubt that Orson would have revealed it. He knew this business only too well and I'm sure he would never have wanted somebody making money with such information about Rita. Even though their marriage didn't last, both stayed very fond of each other. Furthermore, he hardly ever spoke about the women in his life! Only on very few occasions like for his very last interview on the Merv Griffin show in 1985 he would talk about Rita and also Marlene Dietrich, and what great women they were etc. He died a few hours later.

Somebody else mentioned this on another board, too, but it isn't true, either. In fact, her smile with her beautiful teeth became even broader as her wisdom teeth were coming through later. When she was a teenager she still had a lot of baby fat and after dieting she got rid of it.

I guess these days it seems unbelievable that a woman could be that beautiful without plastic surgery.

Online? Yeah, once such a rumour gets started in the internet, it's everywhere, unfortunately. Here are two pictures, one from her early Fox days and the other from the early 70s, that show that she always had the same nose:

She was one of the most beautiful women of the 20th century! And she was highly intelligent! Great pics!

After Rita, Ava is probably my second favourite beauty! Just breathtaking! Wonderful pictures! Thanks!

What a beauty! All those pictures are fabulous!

I just registered to clarify this. No, she didn't have a nose job. And also her chin was all natural. A ridiculous site also claims now that she had bleached her skin but this isn't true, either. They used an old picture of Rita from "Charlie Chan in Egypt" (1935) where they actually put dark make up all over her so that she would look more Egyptian, that's it. But Rita did raise her hairline with an electrolysis treatment for several years in the late 1930s. Even though the treatment was very painful for her, she was very pleased with the result. And getting rid of unwanted hair is no plastic surgery in my book. In the 1970s she did have two face lifts though. She looked really great after the second: Thank you for all those wonderful pictures, by the way! Love them!