9. Rita Hayworth
Born Margarita “Rita” Carmen Cansino, Rita’s father was a Spanish-born dancer and her mother a former Ziegfeld girl. Rita was dancing professionally by age 10 and the family moved to Los Angeles for more work when she was in ninth grade. By age 14, Rita was performing with her father in nightclubs. It was an odd arrangement, to say the least. Rita’s father presented her as his wife, and he even taught her how to tantalize the audience.
The stage work only hinted at what was going on behind the scenes: Rita had been the victim of regular rape and abuse at the hands of her father since childhood. Rita’s mother tried to offer protection by sharing a bed with her daughter at night, but Rita’s father found a way to continue his behavior.
In an effort to escape, 18-year-old Rita married a 41-year-old named Eddie Judson. Eddie, in Rita’s words, saw her as “an investment.” Even though she had already appeared in films as Rita Consuelo—mostly as a dancer—Eddie decided that a less “ethnic” look would boost Rita’s chances at stardom. Electrolysis and a dye job followed, as well as a new name: Rita Hayworth. Eddie also got his wife into the press every way he could including “loaning” her out to men who could advance her career. Not surprisingly, he was as controlling as he was abusive. Eddie threatened disfigurement with lye if Rita ever left him, but she did leave him despite losing all her money to Judson in the process.
Her second marriage to Orson Welles ended badly as well; he was cheating on her within two years. Welles later told stories of Hayworth’s rages and personality changes, both manifestations of childhood abuse. She married five times, all her marriages failed, and she had two daughters who were shuffled from caretaker to caretaker while their mother went off with men. As her biographer, Barbara Leaming, put it, “If the only way you’ve been able to elicit affection from your father is by having sex with him, that’s what you’re going to think is lovable about you.”
8. Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren was born in a charity ward in Rome but grew up in Pozzuoli, near Naples, a place once described as “the most squalid city in Italy.” Her mother and father never married after two kids, which was very scandalous in Catholic Italy, and he left the family destitute when Sophia was a child. She was teased throughout childhood for being a bastard.
Shamed for her behavior, Sophia’s mother had to move in with grandparents. The home was so crowded with a family that Sophia shared a bedroom with eight other people. World War II made life even harder for the people of Italy, and it was practically unbearable in Pozzuoli. Loren has memories of her mother taking water from the car radiator so her daughters would have something to drink, each taking their drink by the spoonful so it was divided up properly.
Sophia and her sister watched German soldiers beating and shooting people in the streets, later saying, “My young eyes saw one appalling, gruesome spectacle after another.” The family nearly starved to death; her mother had to forage for food to supplement the small amount of rationed bread that was available. Sofia was so skinny she earned the nickname “Toothpick.”
At age 14, Sophia started to become the woman we all know her as today, and she was unbelievably gorgeous. It happened quickly, “As if I had burst from an egg and was born,” Sofia claims. When her mother entered her into a beauty contest, the family didn’t have enough money for new clothes so her grandmother used the pink curtains from the living room. Sophia was one of the contest champions and from then on Sofia was “the head of the family.” She would go on to conquer America, even winning a Best Actress Oscar, but the early years of struggle stayed with her. She said, “My life is not a fairy tale, and it’s painful still to speak about it.”