Actress Rita Hayworth was deeply offended and outraged when she found out that her picture and the name of her 1946 film Gilda were placed on an atomic bomb tested by the U.S. military. The bomb was dropped on July 1, 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands as part of Operations Crossroads. Hayworth wanted to hold a public press conference to protest, but Harry Cohn, her studio boss at Columbia Pictures, discouraged her by claiming it would make her look unpatriotic. Her then-husband Orson Welles publicly criticized the stunt during a radio broadcast, expressing hope that their daughter would one day tell her own children that her grandmother’s picture was on the last atomic bomb ever made.
