Rita Moreno names the three greatest roles of her career: “It was fantastic”
Back in 1961, Rita Moreno captivated audiences with her performance as Anita in West Side Story, a role that won her ‘Best Supporting Actress’ at the Academy Awards and cemented her place in Hollywood.
It wasn’t her first rodeo, though. Moreno had been acting on stage since the 1940s before starting her on-screen career the following decade. She bagged roles in everything from Garden of Evil to Singin’ in the Rain during this era, proving her musical abilities as well as her acting chops.
While she has continued acting over the years, appearing in a vast range of projects like Carnal Knowledge, Fast X and even Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, it’s her role as Anita that will always be her most well-known. She’s forever grateful for the part, which she considers one of her favourites of her career.
Talking to Long Island Press, the Puerto-Rican actor discussed some of the roles she’s most proud of, and of course she started with the classic musical, a modern-day riff on the Romeo and Juliet story. Here, Moreno played the the closest friend of Natalie Wood’s Maria, who also happens to be dating Maria’s brother, Bernardo.
Set on the Upper West Side of New York, the warring teenage gangs cause plenty of drama as Maria falls for a member of the opposing group. It’s an iconic musical film and its rightly considered one of the greatest of the genre, and Moreno simply stole the show with her performance.
“That became an iconic role for me. It’s a role that made me known worldwide, more than anything,” she admitted. If not for her, Rachel Zegler, who starred in Spielberg’s version, might not have had the courage to become a star, once admitting, “It wasn’t something that I thought was a possibility for someone like me until I saw Rita Moreno dancing on a rooftop in a beautiful purple dress.”
But which other roles does Moreno consider her favourites? She couldn’t believe it when she was cast in Oz, the ‘90s TV series about a men’s prison. Moreno played a nun who was also a trained psychologist, and she admitted that “it was so far and away from anything I’d played before.” Yet, it soon became one of the most rewarding performances of her lifetime.
“I was absolutely in shock when it was offered to me. My God, the casting in that show was extraordinary. And every year they’d bring in some new actor to play a new prisoner and it would be somebody incredible. Not a star, but an incredible actor. It was fantastic.”
Finally, she picked out a theatre role, unable to shake her love for the medium that kickstarted her career in the first place. “I did a lot of theatre outside of Broadway. I think one of the things I really loved doing was playing Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. I played an Irish girl in that and it was just wonderful and one of the best experiences I ever had.”
The Miracle Worker was previously a film directed by Arthur Penn, but its original source material, a play of the same name, was the basis for Moreno’s stage performance, where she brought to life the story of Helen Keller’s tutor. It certainly wasn’t an easy part, but she pulled it off, and Moreno holds the experience close to her heart.
