Rita Hayworth’s sadly troubled life had a brief respite in 1943, as she worked on the 1944 hit Cover Girl with Gene Kelly and married Orson Welles. Unfortunately, although she reportedly considered Orson the love of her life, the marriage ended in divorce in 1947.
Biographer Barbara Leming recounted her later words to Orson, “You know the only happiness I've ever had in my life has been with you.”
"Welles was overwhelmed with guilt about how badly he had treated her and with sadness at the perspective this gave him on her life. 'If this was happiness,' he would later say of their marriage, 'imagine what the rest of her life had been.'"
On the evening before his death in 1985, two years before Hayworth passed, Welles called her "one of the dearest and sweetest women that ever lived".