![]() ![]() So, on 15 October 1964, Moreno returned to the stage in Lorraine Hansberry's Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Some people claim she steals the picture." Despite her Oscar win, studios offered her only limited roles, pandering to the public's image of Moreno as a spitfire Latina. She received glowing reviews for what one critic called "her stormy, sexy, funny, and first-rate performance." Another critic wrote, "Miss Moreno emerges as a first-rate dramatic talent. On 9 April 1962 West Side Story swept the Academy Awards, winning ten Oscars, including one for Moreno for best supporting actress. When the reading was over she ran from the room, collapsed on a couch, and wept. When she read the lines and the epithets they contained-"Ya lyin' Spic, gold tooth, garlic breath, and pierced ear"-she was transported back some twenty years to the tenements of her youth where, on her way to kindergarten, she ducked snowballs thrown with all the hatred of racial prejudice. She was asked to do a scene where Anita is nearly raped in a drugstore. ![]() Even though Robbins had requested that she audition for the role, Moreno was sure she would not get it. When she arrived for the audition, Moreno found five other actresses vying for the role of Anita. Moreno, busy as well as intimidated, did not, and by the time the movie version was being produced her face had matured and she was better suited to the character of Anita. ![]() A year after her stellar 1956 performance in The King and I, Moreno had been asked by Robbins to try out for the lead role of Maria in the original theater production. Moreno played Anita, Maria's faithful friend. The lovers come to a tragic end, just like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It tells the story of two nice kids, a Puerto Rican girl (Maria) and a Polish boy (Tony), who meet and fall in love despite the hatred and rivalry of their respective ethnic groups. Hailed by movie critics "the finest film musical ever made" and "a cinema masterpiece," West Side Story is a drama of New York City's juvenile gang wars. In 1961 the choreographer Jerome Robbins cast her in the film version of West Side Story. She also appeared on the cover of Life magazine on 1 March 1954. ![]() Moreno's first film appearance was in So Young, So Bad (1950), and she played minor roles in more than two dozen films through the 1950s. Later, in Hollywood, her studio suggested Rita as a first name. It was at this time she adopted her stepfather's surname, Moreno. On 13 November 1945 Moreno made her Broadway debut at the Belasco Theater as Angelina, the youngest sister of an Italian soldier, in Skydrift, a World War II drama that lasted only seven performances. She dropped out of high school at age sixteen. Moreno attended Public School 132 in Brooklyn during this time. From the time she was eleven Moreno was the Spanish-speaking voice of such performers as Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland in dubbed movies. When Moreno was eight her mother began taking her to radio auditions and talent agencies. She studied dancing and, at the age of seven, appeared in a Greenwich Village nightclub with her teacher, Paco Cansino, the uncle of the movie star Rita Hayworth. This neighborhood was a Puerto Rican enclave and the setting of Moreno's greatest cinema triumph in the 1960s, West Side Story, a musical that satirized life in America. Moreno and her mother settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where her mother did piecework as a seamstress. Moreno, born Rosa Delores Alverio, immigrated with her divorced single mother, Rosa MarĂa Marcano Alverio, to New York City in 1936, leaving her father, Paco Alverio, a farmer, and a brother behind. 11 December 1931 in Humacao, Puerto Rico), dynamic actress, singer, and dancer who in the 1960s was the first Latina actress to win an Academy Award and who also received a Grammy, a Tony, and two Emmys. ![]()
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