8 Reasons Why Rita Moreno Is the Greatest of All Time

4. She started as a child star who beat the odds.

Hollywood history is littered with sad tales of young stars who couldn’t cope with fame and were chewed up and spit out by the studio machine. Moreno bucked that trend. After moving to New York from Puerto Rico at age 5, she took dance lessons with the uncle of Rita Hayworth — who inspired the young Rosa Dolores Alverío’s new stage name — and danced professionally in a Greenwich Village nightclub by age 9. Soon she was dubbing Spanish-language versions of American films and, at 13, made her Broadway debut in Skydrift.

Watch: Clips from Moreno’s very first film, 1950’s So Young, So Bad, about a reform school for girls

5. Her career has spanned decades.

A full 67 years after her movie debut in So Young, So Bad, Moreno started a four-season run on a remake of the classic sitcom One Day at a Time (2017-2020). Produced by Norman Lear (now 98), and Gloria Calderón Kellett, the new version followed L.A.’s Cuban-American Alvarez family, with Moreno stealing scenes as the feisty, joke-cracking matriarch, Lydia. Later this year, she returns in another much-anticipated remake, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, in which she’ll appear as Valentina — a gender-swapped version of Doc, the owner of the corner store where Tony works.

Watch: 39 episodes of One Day at a Time on Netflix 

6. She has a very wide range.

Television fans will recognize Moreno from her widely divergent small-screen roles, starting with her Grammy-winning turn on the 1970s’ The Electric Company. Her voice may be equally recognizable to the next generation of children: She played the title role of the international thief on Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? (1994-1999). On the opposite end of the spectrum, she played Sister Peter Marie “Pete” Reimondo, a nun and psychologist who develops romantic feelings for a serial killer, in the very adult, very violent, very sexual HBO prison drama Oz.

Watch: The complete series of Oz on HBO Max — but don’t say we didn’t warn you about the content!

7. She’s been a pioneer for the Latinx community.

It’s hard to imagine Latina celebrities like Jennifer Lopez (51), Gloria Estefan (63) and Salma Hayek (54) having the robust careers they do without Moreno breaking ground first — not only with her bevy of “first” and “only” award wins, but also with her refusal to play stereotypes. Moreno told NPR in 2013 that after winning her Oscar, “I became the house ethnic. And that meant I had to play anything that was not American.” She was passed over for substantive or complex lead characters and instead cast as stereotypical Hawaiians, Native Americans, Egyptians, Filipinas and, in The King and I, a Burmese concubine — plus what she calls all the “Spanish spitfire” characters. Demoralized by the lack of nuance in such roles, she quit acting in movies for seven years, opting for theater work before returning in films like The Night of the Following Day, opposite her ex-boyfriend Marlon Brando.

Watch: The acclaimed Mike Nichols’ comedy Carnal Knowledge, one of her juiciest roles after her return to movies, on Amazon Prime Video

8. She’s responsible for one of Hollywood’s greatest musical moments.

With a melody by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (now 91), “America” in West Side Story is one of the most indelible musical scenes in cinema history. Who can forget Anita singing the praises of the United States against a percussive Latin beat? For her efforts, the American Film Institute ranked the song at number 35 on its “100 Years … 100 Songs” list.

Watch: The show-stopping song on YouTube