

Accolades-and I’m actually getting rid of some of that stuff, too. Our conversations have been combined and edited for length and clarity.Ĭlothing.
#Rita moreno documentary series
We spoke recently at The New Yorker Live, a monthly virtual-event series for subscribers, and again by Zoom. But Moreno has lived long enough to tell the tale her way-and to see Hollywood reckon with its demons. And, during her tumultuous eight-year affair with Marlon Brando, she survived a suicide attempt and a botched abortion. When she got to Hollywood, she was cast as one ethnic stereotype after another-not just spicy Latinas but simple Native American maidens and the Burmese ingénue in “The King and I.” Decades before #MeToo, she was groped and harassed by powerful men and treated as a sex object onscreen.


That meant revisiting its unhappier aspects. “I’d made a big promise to myself that, if I was going to do this, I was going to be as honest as I possibly could be,” Moreno told me recently, of committing her life story to film. In December, she appears in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and this week marks the release of a documentary about her life, “ Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” directed by Mariem Pérez Riera and executive-produced by Lear and Lin-Manuel Miranda. At eighty-nine, Moreno looks and acts half her age, and she’s not slowing down.
#Rita moreno documentary movie
The Academy Award, of course, is for playing the sharp-tongued Anita in “West Side Story” (1961), and her remarkable career stretches from the golden age of movie musicals (“Singin’ in the Rain”) to Norman Lear’s recent reboot of his sitcom “ One Day at a Time,” in which she played a bawdy Cuban grandmother. Since then, Moreno has become one of a handful of people with an EGOT: an Emmy (two, actually), a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. It worked: Mayer eyed her and exclaimed, “She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!” He signed her to a seven-year contract. Moreno had dressed like her role model, Elizabeth Taylor, with a cinched waist and manicured eyebrows. They were told to go to the penthouse, but, she recalls, they didn’t know which elevator button to press. When Rita Moreno was sixteen, her mother brought her to the Waldorf-Astoria to meet Louis B.
