Rita Moreno Through the Years: Her Roles in ‘West Side Story’ and More
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Rita Moreno is the first Latina to achieve EGOT status after earning trophies at the Emmy Awards, Grammy Awards, Oscars and Tony Awards throughout her career.
The actress rose to fame portraying Anita Palacio in the original West Side Story (1961), which earned her the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Prior to playing Anita, Moreno often portrayed stereotypical Latina roles.
“I was playing a Latina, or a native girl or any one of those racial stereotypes. These girls usually were morally questionable, they were sexually easy, they were uneducated . . . it was always those kind of roles,” Moreno said in an October 2021 interview with Houston Matters. “That’s the way they were perceived by those Hollywood executives at the time.”
Anita, Moreno told BuzzFeed in December 2021, was the first character that had “a sense of self-respect.”
“Anita was the only Latina I ever played, at that point, who actually had an identity that was understandable,” Moreno said at the time. “There were really no other Hollywood role models who were Latina that I could look up to. So, Anita became my role model.”
After West Side Story, Moreno took seven years away from acting because she refused to step back into a stereotypical role. She returned to Hollywood in 1968 with The Night of the Following Day and went on to win a Grammy Award for Best Album for Children in 1973 for The Electric Company. Two years later, she took home a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1975 for the Broadway production of The Ritz.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of West Side Story, Ariana DeBose took over the role of Anita while Moreno starred as the local pharmacy owner Valentina.
“The kids playing Latinos are Latinos,” Moreno gushed exclusively to Us Weekly in January 2020. “Can you stand it? You know what, they are their own colors. Some of them are light-skinned, some are Afro-Latino. It’s thrilling. And the kids are so thrilled themselves.”
Keep scrolling to see Moreno’s career in photos:
