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Rita Moreno

Birth Name: Rosa Dolores Alverio
Birthplace: Humacao, Puerto Rico
December 11, 1931 – Present
Years Active: 1942 – Present

Rita Moreno moved from Puerto Rico to New York with her mother at the age of 5. Her first step into the film industry came at age 11 when she started translating English speaking films into Spanish. She got her first role on Broadway at 13 and started receiving attention from Hollywood agents. She left school at the age of 15 to pursue a career in film and started supporting her family financially. She began a contract with MGM studios and started using the stage name Rita Moreno.

For the first years of her career, Rita was only offered stereotypical ethnic roles because of her Puerto Rican roots. Her biggest role came in 1961 with the film adaptation of the musical “West Side Story”. Moreno played Anita and won an Oscar for the role. Even though she won an Oscar for her performance, Moreno still struggled to get outside the stereotypical ethnic roles that Hollywood put her in. As a result, Moreno left Hollywood until the 1970s and acted in theater.

Moreno returned to Hollywood in the 1970s and was in several popular films. She was also a main character on PBS’s The Electric Company, a children’s television show from 1971 to 1977. She won a Grammy for her work on the soundtrack for the show called “The Electric Company Album”. Moreno went on to win an Emmy for her work on the Muppet Show and a Tony for performance in the Broadway musical The Ritz in the 1970s. These awards made Moreno one of 18 people who have achieved an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony).

Since the 1970s, Moreno has appeared in many other television and films that earned her more awards like “The Rockford Files” (1978), “Nine to Five” (1982-1982) and “Oz” (1997-2003). In 2004 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush and in 2009 the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2021, she was in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story” and a documentary about her life was made, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It”. In 2023, she was in movies “80 for Brady” and “Fast X” of the Fast and Furious movies.

In “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It”, Gloria Estefan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gina Rodriguez, America Ferrera, and others all cite Moreno as inspiration for Latin American artists. Fellow Puerto Rican, Jennifer Lopez also credits Rita Moreno as inspiration when she was starting her career.