Rita Moreno has had an amazingly long career winninh an Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy. She was born in 1931 in Puerto Rico. In 1951 she was featured in “The Toast of New Orleans” with Mario Lanza and “Singin in the Rain”. She was featured as one of the young lovers in “The King and I” in 1956. She played the fiery Anita in “Wst Side Story” in 1961. Other film roles “The Ritz”, “The Night of the Following Day”, “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Four Seasons”. On television she played the nun Sister Peter Marie from 1997 until 2003 in “Oz”. She published her autobiography
IMDB entry:
U.S. actress Rita Moreno has had a thriving acting career for the better part of six decades. Moreno, one of the very few (and very first) performers to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy, was born Rosita Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico on December eleventh, 1931. She moved to New York City in 1937 along with her mother, where she began a professional career before reaching adolescence. The eleven-year-old Rosita got her first movie experience dubbing Spanish-language versions of U.S. films. Less than a month before her fourteenth birthday on November eleventh, 1945, she made her Broadway debut in the play “Skydrift” at the Belasco Theatre, costarring withArthur Keegan and the young Eli Wallach. Although she would not appear again on Broadway for almost two decades, Rita Moreno, as she was billed in the play, had arrived professionally.
The cover of the March first, 1954 edition of “Life Magazine” featured a three-quarters, over-the-left-shoulder profile of the young Puerto Rican actress/entertainer with the provocative title “Rita Moreno: An Actresses’ Catalog of Sex and Innocence.” It was sex-pot time, a stereotype that would plague her throughout the decade. If not cast as a Hispanic pepper pot, she could rely on being cast as another “exotic”, such as her appearance on Father Knows Best (1954) as an exchange student from India. Because of a dearth of decent material, Moreno as an actress had to play roles in movies that she considered degrading. Among the better pictures she appeared in were the classic Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The King and I (1956).
Filmmaker Robert Wise, who was chosen to codirect the movie version of the smash hit Broadway musical West Side Story (1961) (a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” with the warring Venetian clans the Montagues and Capulets reenvisioned as Irish/Polish and Puerto Rican adolescent street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks), cast Moreno as “Anita”, the Puerto Rican girlfriend of Sharks’ leader Bernardo, whose sister Maria is the piece’s Juliet.
However, despite her proven talent, roles commensurate with that talent were not forthcoming in the 1960s. The following decade would prove kinder, possibly as the beautiful Moreno had aged and could now be seen by film-makers, T.V. producers and casting directors as something other than the spit-fire/sex-pot that Hispanic women were supposed to conform to. Ironically, it was in two vastly diverging roles — that of a $100 hooker in director Mike Nichols brilliant realization of Jules Feiffer‘s acerbic look at male sexuality, Carnal Knowledge (1971) (1971) and that of Milly the Helper in the children’s T.V. show The Electric Company (1971) (1971) — that signaled a career renaissance.
During the seventies, Moreno won a 1972 Grammy Award for her contribution to “The Electric Company” soundtrack album, following it up three years later with a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for The Ritz (1976), a role she would reproduce on the Big Screen. She then won Emmy Awards for “The Muppet Show” and “The Rockford Files”.
Thereafter, she has continued to work steadily on screen (both large and small) and on-stage, solidifying her reputation as a national treasure, a status that was officially ratified with the award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in June 2004.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
