In front of the camera, Rita Hayworth was the prototype of the ideal of American beauty, twirling alongside Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly. In her private life, shy and plagued by an inferiority complex, the actress multiplied the unhappy marriages. At 19, she married a businessman to escape an incestuous father. In 1943, she married the brilliant Orson Welles, who gave her a daughter and a misunderstood role in "The Lady of Shanghai". Prince Ali Khan and the singer Dick Haymes followed.

Rita Hayworth: Zu viel vom Leben

In 1950, 33-year-old black actor Sidney Poitier starred for the first time in Hollywood history in a film by Joseph Mankiewicz with the prescient title "The Door Opens". When he made his film debut a decade earlier, the self-taught young man, who grew up in the Bahamas before emigrating to New York as a teenager, was not allowed to eat his meals with the rest of the uniformly white studio staff. His character as a young surgeon confronted with racism revealed the hero's potential in a man who, until then, had only played the subordinate roles assigned to "people of color". With just a few carefully selected roles, Sidney Poitier, a staunch activist for the civil rights movement alongside his friend Harry Belafonte, became a star.