RITA WEST SIDE STORY MOVIE
In 1952, she got a cameo in Singin’ in the Rain as the silent movie star Zelda Zanders.
RITA WEST SIDE STORY SKIN
Her skin would be darkened she would be told to speak lines such as: “Why you no love me no more? Why you like white girl?” in an “exotic” accent. “Illiterate, immoral characters – men’s little island girls,” Moreno says. Nor did she have any idea about the roles she would end up playing. ‘She’s what I’ve always wanted to be!’ Moreno as Anita in West Side Story.
It turned into a stalking situation.” Did she realise beforehand what went on in Hollywood? “I had no idea.” “He found my phone number and started to call me all the time. Then there was Buddy Adler, who ran 20th Century Fox. But I was horrified.” If Cohn was alive today, does she think he would be in jail for sex offences? “Yes, I think Harvey Weinstein would have had company. “I had just met the man and he said, with his wife in the room, by the way: ‘You better watch out – I’d like to fuck you.’ That may have been the third time I’d heard that word in my life, and I stood there and giggled. Soon after being raped, she was introduced to the notorious sexual predator Harry Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures, at a party. “I was so horrified that all I was able to say was: ‘You’re a piece of work,’ and I got up and left.” “I was examining every inch of his face and his soul and, when his wife went to the bathroom, he came back to the day he raped me and said: ‘You know, I always wished I had made you pregnant.’ She repeats his words, still shocked. He said: ‘My wife would like to meet you would you have lunch with us?’” For some reason, she said yes. Moreno met him recently for the first time in 70 years. The shameful thing, she says, is that she kept him on because she thought he was the only person in the industry looking out for her. As a teenager, she was raped by her agent. Moreno had a brutal introduction to showbusiness. In 1950, at 18, she signed to MGM a year later, she moved to 20th Century Fox. She dropped out of school at 15 and by 16 was the family’s breadwinner. At six, she made her professional debut at Greenwich theatre. From her earliest days, she remembers being called a “spic”. When she was four, her mother took her to New York in search of a better life, leaving behind Rita’s father (whom she saw again only once) and brother. Moreno was born in Puerto Rico to a seamstress and a farmer.
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