![]() Struck by the resemblance, Mayer offered her a contract on the spot. Seeking an appropriately starry look for the encounter, Moreno styled herself after Elizabeth Taylor. I didn’t realise how many of them would not be coming back.”Īt 16, already the family’s sole breadwinner, she was spotted by an MGM talent scout and summoned to a meeting at the Waldorf Astoria with studio boss Louis B Mayer. “A bell would ring and half the boys in the canteen would leave. “I sang Rum and Coca-Cola in a hat my mother had made to make me look like Carmen Miranda,” she says. She was hired to perform at the docks for soldiers heading off to fight in the Second World War. She made her professional debut at a bar in Greenwich Village at the age of six, was adding her voice to the Spanish dub of films by the age of 11, and made her first appearance on Broadway at 13. ![]() “Boy gangs” hurled racist abuse at her as she walked along the freezing pavements: spic, garlic mouth, gold tooth.Īfter taking up dancing lessons with Rita Hayworth’s uncle, it dawned on little Moreno that performance might be “the perfect panacea”. Her arrival in wintry, concrete New York felt like a reversal of The Wizard of Oz: in that moment, her life went from Technicolor to black and white. But in February 1936, her seamstress mother (still only 22) moved to New York with her little “Rosita”, leaving behind an ex-husband and young son. Her earliest memories are of a lush green paradise in which she was always barefoot. Moreno, one of only six women ever to win the EGOT “grand slam” of performance awards – picking up Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony statuettes – was born Rita Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, in December 1931. At my age, what the hell am I protecting, anyway? I have the power to give people the truth and I think that can be immensely helpful”. I promised myself I would not indulge in any bulls. But watching news coverage of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, she realised “that my story was profoundly relevant to what’s happening in our society right now. Speaking by phone from her home in Los Angeles, she tells me that when the film-makers first approached her about the new documentary, she wasn’t sure she had much to say. “My lines were ‘Why you like white woman?’ and ‘Why you take gold from my people?’” ![]() “I had to talk lahhk theeees,” she says of the generic “ethnic accent” she was required to deploy, whether playing characters of Thai, Native American or Latin American origin. In Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, she describes being raped by her agent at 17, repeatedly betrayed by her long-term lover Marlon Brando, and cast as a series of demeaning “dusky maidens”, plastered in make-up the colour of mud. ![]() “I have grit, I love to laugh, I know I give off these positive vibes.”īut when it came to making a new documentary about her extraordinary life as a Puerto Rican in Hollywood, Moreno knew she would have to be frank about some of the “terrible” experiences through which she had kept on smiling. Now, on the brink of 90, she’s returning for Steven Spielberg’s remake – “fabulous, of course” – in a new part tailor-made for her. “Fiery? Fearless? Sexy? Oh yes! I can be all those things,” says Rita Moreno who, 60 years ago, brought those qualities to her blazing, Oscar-winning performance as Anita in West Side Story. ![]()
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