The fortune of the beloved star Rita Hayworth has been estimated at two million pounds; the actress contested this estimate and thought it should be cut by half.

A journalist spoke with her about the sources of this fortune and how she gathered it, and she said:

• I earned 60 thousand pounds from the appearance of my picture as advertising for beauty and glamour products?!

• I gathered 100 thousand pounds from prizes and admirers' gifts on the occasions of my winning, several times over, in the beauty and glamour contests of America.

• And a sum of 150 thousand pounds from my tour during the war to entertain the soldiers and fighting men.

• And a sum of 100 thousand pounds from commercial companies in return for the use of my picture, my signature, and my endorsements as advertising to promote the sale of the companies' products — especially beauty products, fashions, and bathing costumes!

• And a sum of 50 thousand pounds from the company holding the monopoly of the stars' telephones, in return for conversations of a few fixed minutes which I granted to admirers from the various countries of the two American continents?

I have kept all these sums — four hundred thousand pounds — and have not spent a single dollar of them; on the contrary, I added to them the remaining six hundred thousand pounds of my profits from films.

As for how I spent on myself and lived in high style, that was done out of the money left over from my salaries and my cinema earnings.

Then she added: The press finds it too much that a great actress like me should gather a million pounds, or two, or three — though I ought to have saved at least ten million pounds... That opportunity was offered me when the late Douglas Fairbanks proposed that we found a film company together, but I refused, preferring to work as a free-lance film star, far from the responsibili-ties of companies and their accounts and their management.