The golden statuette was still warm in her hands when the silence began. Rita Moreno, the first Latina ever to win an Academy Award, had just made history for her role as Anita in West Side Story, yet the phone in her Hollywood home refused to ring with the offers she had been promised her entire career. The year was 1962, and the woman who had just conquered the industry was about to be erased by it.
The triumph of that April night masked a private catastrophe that had nearly ended her life just six months earlier. Moreno had swallowed a fistful of Marlon Brando’s sleeping pills and lain down on his bed, not to punish the man who had broken her, but to destroy the version of herself that kept returning to him. The 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 had spanned eight years, two of his marriages, and countless infidelities, culminating in a botched abortion that left her bleeding for days with the evidence of the procedure still inside her.
Born Rosa Dolores Alverío Marcano in Humacao, Puerto Rico, in 1931, Moreno had been a professional dancer by age nine, performing in Greenwich Village nightclubs while her mother cycled through five husbands. The family’s migration to New York in 1936 had been a reverse Wizard of Oz, a passage from the Technicolor tropics into what she described as a world of grit, gray, and cold ash. She arrived speaking no English and was immediately hospitalized with chickenpox, alone and bewildered that the nurses did not love her the way everyone in her hometown had.
Hollywood’s solution to her otherness was to make her a costume. Louis B. Mayer signed her because she looked like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor, then had no idea what to do with her.
She was cast as Hawaiian, Native American, Egyptian, Filipino, and Burmese, always speaking in the same generic sing-song accent that corresponded to no real place on Earth. Life magazine put her on its cover in 1954 beneath the caption “Rita Moreno: An Actress’s Catalog of 𝒔𝒆𝒙 and Innocence.” She was 22 years old and had been reduced to inventory.
The men around her treated the catalog as an open menu. On 60 Minutes, decades later, she told Bill Whitaker that she had been raped by her agent when she was 16 or 17. “I struggled, but he did it all,” she said, explaining that she kept him because he was the only person working for her so-called career.
At a studio publicity party, a liquor magnate pulled her onto the floor and ground against her until she fled to the garden, where Mexican gardeners helped her get home without asking questions. They already knew.
Then came Brando. She met him in 1954 on the set of Désirée, and the first sight of him sent her body temperature climbing “as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath.” He was swaggeringly irresistible, a profile for a Roman coin, and he became the most important relationship of her life and very nearly its end.
He was also, in her words, “a bad guy when it came to women,” unfaithful as a habit, constant and impersonal, breaking her heart and crushing her spirit with equal measure.
When she found another woman’s lingerie in his house, she went home weeping and furious, resolving never to see him again. The very next day, Elvis Presley’s manager called to say the King had spotted her at the Fox commissary and would like to meet her. “I saw the underwear,” she said, “and I said yes.”
The romance fizzled—Elvis was sweet but boring, a country boy with no follow-through—but the effect on Brando was everything she could have wished. He started throwing chairs. It was wonderful.
The pregnancy that followed was not. Brando arranged and paid for an illegal abortion that was botched so grotesquely that the fetus remained inside her for days before she was rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery. His reaction was fury, not at the danger to her, but that the man he had paid had wronged him.
He then departed for Tahiti, where he fell in love with his co-star and married her. Moreno, left alone in his house, swallowed his sleeping pills and lay down to die.
She was not trying to punish him. “What I was really trying to do was 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 me that kept going back to him,” she later explained. “That bad woman who didn’t respect me, who was me, another side of me.”
His assistant found her in time. They pumped her stomach. She lived.
It was Brando himself, with an irony almost too tidy to bear, who urged her into therapy that eventually let her leave him. When Whitaker offered the obvious sentiment—”Thank God you failed”—she agreed with feeling. “You’re not kidding.”
Six months later, she danced across a rooftop in a purple dress, radiant and defiant, in the film that would make her immortal. But the Oscar did not ring the phone. The only parts on offer were the gang girls and spitfires she had just proven she could transcend.
“I showed them,” she said with bitterness sharpened into comedy. “I didn’t make another movie for seven years after winning the Oscar.” She went to the theater, then to London, and held the line with one of the slimmest acts of self-respect in Hollywood history.
The drought broke in the 1970s, when she simply took what she wanted. She joined The Electric Company, teaching a generation of American kids to read with her iconic scream of “Hey you guys,” and won a Grammy for the cast recording. She appeared in Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge as a $100 prostitute opposite Jack Nicholson, then created the character of Googie Gomez, a tone-deaf, magnificently deluded Puerto Rican showgirl, which won her a Tony on Broadway.
She collected two Emmys in consecutive years, completing the EGOT and becoming only the third person in history to hold all four major entertainment awards.
Her marriage to cardiologist Leonard Gordon in 1965 lasted 45 years until his death in 2010, but she later revealed it had been, in her own devastating word, a charade. He was a controller who managed her career and her life, and she stayed largely for their daughter. When he finally died, she cut a lock of his silver hair to keep, then felt something she had not expected: liberated.
Asked if she might ever marry again, she gave an answer that belongs on a headstone. “I’d rather eat glass.”
She kept a photograph of Brando in her bedroom to the end, and a photograph of her husband as well. “Brando was the lust of my life,” she said. “My husband is the love of my life.”
The two were never the same thing and were never going to be. In 1968, she was cast opposite Brando in The Night of the Following Day and had to act out a fight scene with the man who had driven her to near death. He wanted to start again.
She was married now and a mother. She declined. He never entirely let go, telephoning her in his final years to whisper that he loved her.
In her 80s, Moreno had a full renaissance. She joined the Netflix revival of One Day at a Time as Lydia, the Cuban-American grandmother, on a single non-negotiable condition: “She has to be sexual, otherwise I’m not interested.” Then Steven Spielberg remade the film that made her, and instead of consigning her to the past, built her a place in the present.
She served as executive producer and played Valentina, a character invented for her, reaching back across 60 years to intervene in the near-rape of the new Anita, played by Ariana DeBose. It did not feel real, she said, and she was not sure she ever managed it.
When DeBose won the Oscar for the same role, she and Moreno became only the third pair of performers ever to win for the same part. The girl in the purple dress and the girl who inherited it, both holding the same gold idol. Now 94 years old, Moreno has not slowed so much as a step.
She says she would rather eat glass than retire, and you have to believe her, because for Rita Moreno, the alternative to working was never rest. It was disappearance. She decided somewhere along the way to go for it, and then simply never stopped.
The going has lasted almost 90 years.