Rita Moreno
First Latina to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony
Nobody said I was going to be a star someday. Especially not in this country. I was just a Puerto Rican child. But I knew I was going to be very active in show business. I loved it. I was dancing for my grandpa from the time I was 4 or 5 years old in Puerto Rico.
I was a very passive young woman, and I let everybody in the world tell me what to do. And I listened to the next person who said, “Well, you know what you really should do is ...”
It did not serve me in good stead, to say the very least. If I had had a manager, probably this person would have said to me, “OK, you’ve played enough of those ‘native’ girls, now let’s say no each time that’s offered to you.” But all I knew was that that was the only kind of employment I could get, so that’s what I did. And so for years and years, I was really very miserable and hurt that I was only seen in one way and having to speak always, always with an accent. I couldn’t even audition for anything that wasn’t a “native” girl.
Managers in those days only handled big stars. You rarely heard of a young starlet who had a manager. So I had no advice from anybody. I had agents, and agents—if you’re unlucky, and I was one of the unlucky ones—are job-getters. They’re not careermakers.
I had no real role model. There was nobody that I could look up to and say that’s somebody like me. There was no such person. Which is probably why I’m now known in my community as La Pionera, “the pioneer.” I really don’t think of myself as a role model. But it turns out that I am to a lot of the Hispanic community. Not just in show business but in life. But that’s what happens when you’re the first, right?
I have done nothing else in my life except perform. Which is unusual because almost everyone I know has been a secretary, an x-ray technician, something, anything in order to make a living. And I actually was able to make a living from almost the beginning, being paid for what I loved most to do.
I call myself the hardware shelf. There’s a lot of awards and honors there. And I have earned that. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t beg for it, I didn’t pay for it. I earned that. People see the accomplishments—but it’s good to remind people that so much strife and labor and tears and heartbreak came before that, that it really is earned.
I’m trying as hard as I can to keep pushing the boundaries of what a woman is capable of doing. And it turns out there’s a lot we can do. There’s a lot we can speak about. The way we’re perceived is still in the ancient times, but I think we’re on our way. We now feel so strong, and that we’re entitled to feel as we do, whatever it happens to be. No one’s going to tell me how to make my own choices. For too many years, everybody told me what to say and what to do and how to be.
As Anita in the 1961 film West Side Story
Moreno is one of 12 people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.