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Photo: Amanda Friedman |
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Melting the Lens
Rita Moreno has a good feeling about her newest movie, Casa de los babys. "This movie is going to win prizes," she says. The multi-talented actress had no such premonitions when she won her first big award-the Oscar for her role as Anita in 1961's West Side Story. She was barely 30 at the time. "Oh, what did I know then?" she asks. Not nearly what she knows now, after 66 years of acting, dancing, and singing on film, television, and stage. Since that first Oscar, she has earned the four most prestigious awards in show business. Moreno's Berkeley, California, den is one of the few places in the world where an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, two Emmys, as well as a slew of other awards, reside together. For Moreno, who is 71, being older has its advantages. Sure, it brings wrinkles, but it also brings experience and wisdom that Moreno thinks is inherently sexy. "Life experience is always very sexy," she says. "There is nothing like a wise pair of eyes looking into yours."
And Rita Moreno's eyes can still melt a camera lens. She even made the part of a nun sexy, in the critically acclaimed HBO series Oz. The harsh boundary-breaking series about life in an experimental prison ended recently, after its sixth season. In one story line, Moreno, who played the prison's psychologist, Sister Peter Marie Reimondo, began having sexual fantasies about a prisoner she was counseling. "That was my idea," Moreno says. "No one has ever investigated the sensual life of a religious person," she told Oz creator, writer, and producer Tom Fontana. Fontana, known for perverse casting, took it one step further and chose a sexual predator, played by Chris Meloni, as the object of Sister Pete's desire. "She became very attracted to him," Moreno says. "He was dangerous, almost sinister. The sparks flew." Moreno adored her role in the series, partly because it was different from any role she had played before. When Fontana offered Moreno the part she was shocked. "'I would be playing a nun?'" she asked incredulously. "I was so flattered," says Moreno, who spent her early career playing stereotypical sultry Latin sirens and the rest of it trying to fight that image. "There was no typecasting of any kind" in Oz. Still, she hesitated. "I knew the show would be shot in very harsh light," she says. "I thought, 'Well, you know, I am getting older anyway, maybe it's time to face up to that.' " The role brought Moreno a whole new generation of fans. "It is quite nice," Moreno says. "Now people who have never even heard of West Side Story know me from Oz." Ask anyone from 20 to 70 who Rita Moreno is and there is a good chance the person will know the name but will remember her for different roles. While the 20-somethings will mention the nun on Oz, 30-somethings are likely to remember her from the educational program Electric Company, which earned her the Grammy for an Electric Company album. Those from 40 to 55 will remember her Oscar-winning performance in West Side Story. And her oldest fans are likely to recall her pin-up-girl years in the '50s, when she made movies for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (MGM). Moreno signed a contract with MGM at age 17. She had already been in the business about 12 years, by her accounting. "From the time I was a little girl I was in the business," Moreno says. Born Rosa Dolores Alverio, Moreno remembers dancing for her grandfather in her native Puerto Rico as records played. Soon after moving to New York with her mother, she began taking dance lessons at age 5. By the time little "Rosita" was 13, she was acting on Broadway. At 17, she signed an MGM contract and changed her name to Rita Moreno at the suggestion of studio head, Louis B. Mayer. "They wanted to call me Tina Marina," Moreno remembers. "As shy and reluctant to say 'No' as I was at that age, I couldn't live with that name." Rita Moreno was a compromise, one of many made in those years when typecasting was fully entrenched. Throughout the 1950s, Moreno was cast as sexy one-dimensional Hispanas and, in The King and I, she played a gift to the king of Siam for his harem. There was a glint of racial awareness in that role: Her character, Tuptim, staged a reenactment of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the early 1960s, Moreno's dancing, singing and acting abilities landed her a role in West Side Story, a successful Broadway musical being turned into a movie. Finally, she would play a part of substance-a strong-willed Puerto Rican immigrant. But there were elements of stereotyping. West Side Story's makers insisted on darkening the skin of all the actors playing Puerto Ricans. Moreno explained to the directors that Puerto Ricans have many different skin colors; nevertheless, everyone was darkened. "That made me crazy!" she says. George Chakiris, who played her doomed love interest, Bernardo, was especially darkened. "In one scene it looks for all the world like George has been taken and dumped into mud," she remembers. Still, her role of Anita in the movie is her favorite. "Aside from the fact that it gave me worldwide fame and the Oscar and the Golden Globe, it was just an astonishing movie," she says. Moreno says typecasting is still alive and well in the industry. "It happens to Latinos, and, oh God, Asians are practically invisible in movies," she says. You would think Moreno would be exempt. With a list of film, stage, and television credits that goes on for several pages, aren't producers constantly knocking on her door to offer worthwhile work? The question draws the classic Moreno stare-ice cold and poker-hot at the same time. "What do you think?" she asks, still unblinking. "No. There aren't any roles written for women my age. It's very difficult to find substantial roles." She does get offered roles, but many, she finds, are without substance. Coffee pourers, she calls them. "She just pours coffee and says, 'Oh, how awful.' " Still, Moreno stays incredibly busy. Recently she has been promoting Casa de los babys, in which she plays a hotel owner in a South American country where American women stay while waiting to adopt babies. The film was written and directed by John Sayles, one of the most respected independent filmmakers. "It is a really, really good movie," she says. She also lends her name to causes such as osteoporosis prevention and raising awareness for diabetes prevention. Strokes and heart attacks caused by diabetes are "epidemic" among Hispanics, she says. Moreno has plans to play opera singer Maria Callas in the play Master Class next year at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a role that will keep her close to home. Moreno increasingly finds her professional life playing a tug-of-war with her family life in Berkeley. She decided to take off the last few months of this year. "I am just going to be a family person, which I don't get enough of," Moreno says. She plans to spend her time reveling in the joys of cooking, mothering, grandmothering, and building her dream house a little higher up the hill from where she lives now. Moreno and Leonard Gordon, a medical doctor and her husband of 38 years, moved to Berkeley five years ago from Los Angeles, to be closer to their beloved only daughter, Fernanda. "It was the best move we have ever made," she says. Fernanda lives down the street with her husband and Moreno's two grandchildren, Justin, 5, and Cameron, 3. The boys spend about two nights a week with their grandparents, but Moreno's home looks as though they are there full-time-with stuffed animals and Play-Doh® in the dining room, a high chair and bins of toys in the family room, a train set in the living room, and a plastic tricycle on the patio. Moreno was 35 when her daughter was born. At the time, she was considered an old mother. "Fernanda was our dream," Moreno says. "She is the love of my life." The grandchildren have brought Moreno a second wave of that love. "It's a privilege to be able to do it again," she says. "What a treat. And for it to happen this late in life." Moreno recently turned down two Broadway plays that would have kept her in New York for months, so that she can spend more time with her grandchildren. "I can't bear being away from the babies," she says. "Mind you, it wasn't an easy decision. I would think about it and think about it and ruminate." In the end, she decided she could never get back the time she would miss with her fast-growing grandchildren. "I don't want regrets on my death bed. I don't want to say, 'If only.' " In addition to doting on her grandchildren, Moreno and her husband have been busy for the last two years with another "baby"-a new home, the first one they have ever had built from scratch. "This is our dream house," she says. But even with all the allures of domestic life, Moreno can't imagine not working as an actor. And she is always looking for the role perfect enough to pull her away from home. "I am one of those rare creatures who has never done anything else in the world but be an actor. I was meant to do this. I can't imagine not knowing what I want to do for the rest of my life." Now get the full rundown on Rita Moreno’s career and the awards that it has brought her. |
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