By Simon Hattenstone, Photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, The Guardian, November 29, 2021
Rita Moreno pops up on my computer screen in a bright red hat, huge pendant necklace and tortoiseshell glasses. “Well, here I am in my full glory,” she says from her home in Berkeley, California. And glorious she sure is. Moreno is a couple of weeks short of her 90th birthday, but look at her and you would knock off 20 years. Listen to her and you would knock off another 50.
Can I wish you an advance happy birthday, I ask. “Yes, you can. Isn’t it exciting?” Moreno is one of the acting greats. But she could have been so much greater. She is one of only six women to have bagged the Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), alongside Helen Hayes, Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and Liza Minnelli. Yet she has spent much of her career battling typecasting or simply not being cast at all.
A few days later, she features in one of the cinema events of the year – Steven Spielberg’s remake of the Bernstein/Sondheim classic West Side Story, released 60 years after Moreno mesmerised audiences as Anita, the girlfriend of the gang leader Bernardo. This time, she plays a character specially created for her by the film’s scriptwriter, Tony Kushner – Valentina is the widow of Doc, who ran the sweet shop in the original.
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