Word: rita
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...famous family of Spanish dancers, she was dancing 20 shows a week professionally when she was in her early teens. Her father made his daughter his partner, and dyed her brown hair black in an attempt to make her look more Latin. Precociously alluring as well as arrestingly attractive, Rita soon found a place in such B-grade movies as Under the Pampas Moon (1935). At 18 she married Edward Judson, a sometime auto salesman who at once saw what was wrong: her real appeal was not Latin but all-American. After lightening her hair, he introduced her to Harry...
Hollywood has decreed that love goddesses never find lasting love, and Rita's marriages unreeled like so many bad movies. After her 1943 divorce from Judson came Orson Welles, but "Orsie," with whom she had a daughter Rebecca, was devoted mostly to Orsie. "I'm tired of being a 25% wife," she later said. In 1949, with the whole world looking on, she wed the playboy Aly Khan, with whom she had her second daughter Yasmin. The match lasted only two years, but she remembered him fondly: "The world was magical when you were with him." There were two more...
...student's will to win and her teacher's self-destructive need to fail emerges sharply, and the play becomes a discerning essay on how much of anyone's fate is self-imposed. Like Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green, to which it owes its basic theme, this Rita convincingly argues that the discovery of learning is far more seductive, even to the young, than the exploration of mere...
...recent seasons, however, the cultural exchange has begun to work both ways, with regional theaters that have developed promising productions often joining forces with Manhattan institutions or producers. That is the case with two current off-Broadway delights: a lively feminist interpretation of the British social-class comedy Educating Rita by Chicago's Steppenwolf, the ensemble's sixth foray into Manhattan in the past five seasons; and a bewitchingly surreal satire with songs, Three Postcards, the second offering this season originated by California's South Coast Repertory, which, despite its setting in conservative Orange County, south of Los Angeles, specializes...
Willy Russell's Rita was a risky choice for Steppenwolf and the two performers, Austin Pendleton and Laurie Metcalf: audiences were likely to have vivid memories of the 1983 film that won Oscar nominations for Michael Caine and Julie Walters as a drunken, shambling university teacher and his bright but unschooled adult-education pupil. But the troupe has put its own stamp on the show, particularly in Metcalf's performance, which persuasively blends resurgent hope and hints of fiercely suppressed desperation. The romance that dominated the film is played down, and the title character emerges as no winsome waif...