‘F**k them! You can dress any damn way you please’

Rita Moreno doesn’t maintain something again within the new documentary about her ground-breaking profession, Rita Moreno: Only a Lady Who Determined to Go for It.

The 89-year-old EGOT-winning display screen legend opens about quite a few struggles by way of her celebrated and often-troubled life and profession, from leaving her brother behind when her mom moved them from Puerto Rico to New York, dealing with harassment from Outdated Hollywood fits, being raped by her agent, having a botched abortion after being impregnated by Marlon Brando, and trying suicide consequently.

“I made a promise to myself that I might be as sincere and truthful as I may presumably be, and that’s precisely what occurred,” Moreno tells Yahoo Leisure in a brand new interview (watch above).

Within the movie, directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, Moreno bemoans the truth that after signing a contract with MGM as a teen, she was solid solely in “island woman” and “dusky maiden” roles due to her ethnicity. She was solely checked out as a intercourse object, she says, which drew her undesirable consideration and assaults from highly effective males within the enterprise.

“The reality is, it by no means occurred to me to not face up to it,” Moreno says now. “I figured, and I used to be proper, that that was how Hollywood was run and the way it functioned. And I simply went with the circulate, as they are saying, not fortunately. And it’s the very factor that finally drove me into psycho remedy, which might be one of the best favor I ever did myself. You realize, for those who’re Latina, issues are by no means nice. At the very least then, particularly. You simply anticipate that.

“You hate it once they name you a intercourse object. And right here’s the reality, and that is one thing I didn’t point out [in the film] solely as a result of I didn’t give it some thought. I might gown up in a really, very provocative method. I at all times wore tight, tight little attire with my cute little bum. An excessive amount of make-up, normally. And the earrings and stuff, and I by some means by no means acknowledged that that wasn’t serving to. Then again, because the #MeToo motion would say proper now: Nicely, f**ok them! … You may gown any rattling method you please. You may put on as many loop earrings, and as low-cut a neck as you need, and that’s additionally true.”

Story continues

Regardless of the ethnic denigration and limitations she confronted, Moreno finally grew to become one in all Hollywood’s most treasured stars because of roles in movies like The King and I (1956) and West Aspect Story (1961) and a surging late-career bounty of numerous roles. In 1977, Moreno grew to become the primary Latina (and on the time solely third individual ever) to attain the vaunted EGOT, profitable an Oscar for West Aspect Story in 1962, a Grammy for The Electrical Firm in 1972, a Tony for The Ritz in 1975 and an Emmy for The Muppet Present in 1977. (She’d win a second Emmy a yr later for The Rockford Recordsdata.)

Moreno instructed us it’s the “O” meaning essentially the most.

“It needs to be the Oscar, it needs to be the Oscar for all the plain causes,” she says. “It’s the long-lasting assist that you just obtain from your individual trade. And {that a} Puerto Rican woman received this was actually, actually significant.”

Nonetheless, Moreno notes bias was so overwhelming and alternatives so restricted within the trade that she couldn’t discover work after profitable an Oscar for taking part in Anita in West Aspect Story as a result of she was solely supplied “gang issues on lesser scale.”

“It broke my coronary heart, it actually broke my coronary heart,” she says. “I assumed, ‘Nicely, clearly it has nothing to do with expertise.’”

As for her biggest triumph? “That I’m nonetheless alive and dealing, as a working actress,” says Moreno, who co-starred on the Netflix sitcom One Day at a Time from 2017 to 2020, will seem in a task specifically created for her in Steve Spielberg’s upcoming remake of West Aspect Story (which she additionally government produced) this fall and simply filmed a cameo in a TV manufacturing of Depraved.

“That’s what’s so fantastic.”

Rita Moreno: Only a Lady Who Determined to Go for It is now enjoying.

—Video produced by Nurys Castillo and edited by Jimmie Rhee

Watch the trailer:

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