During her time at Fox, Hayworth appeared in five non-notable roles pictures. By the end of her six-month contract, Fox had merged into 20th Century Fox, with Darryl F. Zanuck serving as the executive producer. Hayworth was dismissed, her contract wasn’t renewed.
Feeling that Hayworth had screen potential, the salesman and promoter Edward C. Judson, whom she would marry in 1936, got her the lead roles in several independent films and arranged a screen test with Columbia Pictures. The studio head Harry Cohn signed Hayworth to a long-term contract, and cast her in small roles in Columbia features.
Often cast as the exotic foreigner, Hayworth appeared in several roles in 1935: in ‘Dante's Inferno”, and “Paddy O'Day”. She was an Argentinean in “Under the Pampas Moon” and an Egyptian beauty in “Charlie Chan in Egypt”. In 1936 she took her first starring role as a "Latin type" in “Human Cargo”.
Cohn argued that Cansino's image was too Mediterranean, which reduced her opportunities to being cast in "exotic" roles, more limited in number. With Cohn and Judson's encouragement, Hayworth changed her hair color to dark red and her name to Rita Hayworth. She had electrolysis to raise her hairline and broaden the appearance of her forehead. By using her mother's maiden name, she led people to see her British-American ancestry and became a classic "American" pin-up.
In 1937, Hayworth appeared in five minor Columbia pictures and three minor independent movies. The following year, she appeared in five Columbia B films. In 1939, Cohn pressured director Howard Hawks to use Hayworth for a small but important role as a man-trap in the aviation drama “Only Angels Have Wings”. With this film's box-office success, fan mail for Hayworth began pouring into Columbia's publicity department. Cohn began to see Hayworth as his first and official new star. The studio never officially had stars under contract, except for Jean Arthur, who was trying to break with it.
Cohn began to build Hayworth up in 1940, in features such as “Music in My Heart”, “The Lady in Question”, and “Angels Over Broadway”. That year she was first featured in a Life magazine photo. He loaned Hayworth to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to appear in “Susan and God”. While on loan to Warner Brothers, Hayworth appeared as the second female lead in “The Strawberry Blonde”, opposite James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland. As the film was a big box-office success, Hayworth's popularity rose; she immediately became one of Hollywood's hottest properties. So impressed was Warner Brothers that they tried to buy Hayworth's contract from Columbia, but Cohn refused to release her.
Her success led to a supporting role in “Blood and Sand”, with Fox. The studio that had dropped her six years before. In one of her most notable screen roles, Hayworth played Doña Sol des Muire, the first of many screen sirens. This was another box-office hit.
She returned in triumph to Columbia Pictures and was cast in the musical “You'll Never Get Rich” opposite Fred Astaire. It was in one of the highest-budgeted films Columbia had ever made. So successful was the picture that the following year, the studio produced and released another Astaire-Hayworth picture, “You Were Never Lovelier”. In 1942, Hayworth also appeared in two other pictures, “Tales of Manhattan” and “My Gal Sal”.
During this period, Hayworth was featured in an August 1941 Life Magazine photo, in which she lounged seductively in a black-lace negligee. When the U.S. joined World War II in December 1941, the photo made Hayworth one of the top two "pin-up girls" of the war years; the other was the blonde Betty Grable. In 2002, the satin nightgown Hayworth wore for the photo sold for $26,888.
