GROSS: Can you talk a little bit about the choreography that Jerry Robbins worked out for the rape scene? That was filled with every terrible anger that I have ever experienced in my life - that line. And somebody puts their hand on my shoulder, and I turn around and say, don't you touch me - wow. And by the time we got to the part of the scene where the doc, the candy store owner, comes in and stops the rape, the symbolic rape, and I go to the door and say, don't you touch me - 'cause I think they were saying something like, don't let her get away. GROSS: When you were able to start shooting the film again, do you feel like that personal connection deepened your performance? Or did it get in the way of it because it was so upsetting? It's all of the terrible things that happened to me - not like that, but it was symbolic of all of the terrible things that have happened - that happened to me when I was younger that apparently just inundated my soul and seared my soul. But there is a huge piece of my soul in that scene. And you know, I calmed down, obviously, after lunch, and we got it all done. And I couldn't stop.Īnd finally, Bob Wise called lunch. And the boys came to me saying, oh, Rita, please, you know we love you. As I speak of it, I start getting tears in my eyes. I must have cried for about 45 minutes and just - there was no consoling me. I stopped, and I sat down at the stool at the candy counter, put my head on my arms, and started to sob and cry. And at some point, having the boys constantly cursing me out and throwing me around and calling me things like spic and garlic mouth and a pierced ear apparently opened up some wounds that I thought had been healed years and years and years before then.Īnd I remember that, at that point - and I think it was in the middle of shooting, this - some part of that scene. And then we got to the shooting which took about - I would say about seven days.
#Rita moreno young dancer movie#
We rehearsed that number for - as we did with everything in that movie - for weeks. I'm glad you brought that up because that was a seminal scene for me, and some interesting and personal, emotional pond scum came to the (laughter) surface. But it's all kind of stylized and choreographed. MORENO: Yes, if it had been done a few years ago, that's what would have happened. And they start taunting you, and the implication is that they've raped you, too. To the candy store to give a message to the owner there. And this is right after the "I Have A Love" duet. Maria, the Natalie Wood character, asks you to send a message to her boyfriend Tony. There's a scene toward the end of the movie after your boyfriend Bernardo has been stabbed. GROSS: Rita Moreno, I want to ask you about another scene. And when I saw the film recently and saw George Chakiris, this beautiful guy, Greek guy (laughter) who looked like he had fallen into a bucket of mud, I just started - I started to giggle. And nobody paid attention, and that was that. Some of us are Taino Indian, which is the original Puerto Rican. We're all, you know, many, many different colors. The thing that really bothered me the most is that they put the same very muddy, dark-colored makeup on every Shark girl and boy.
MORENO: They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us obviously don't have them. TERRY GROSS: Did you have to do anything to look more, act more or sound more Puerto Rican?
So as a result, the Sharks - gosh, there were just a few of us, really, who were truly Latino who were able to get the part. They were a lot like in a way like the street dancers years later, the kids who danced on their backs and all that kind of stuff, who had talent but didn't have the training. The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, Is that a lot of Latin kids - Latino kids in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes.
#Rita moreno young dancer professional#
RITA MORENO: The reason was that there simply weren't enough Hispanic - forget Puerto Rican - Hispanic male and female dancers at the time who could do the kind of professional job that was needed for Jerome Robbins' choreography, which is, you might have noticed, extremely complex and very difficult. She was one of the few actors playing a Puerto Rican who was actually from Puerto Rico. Now we're going to hear an excerpt of our 2001 interview with Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita.
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