Rita Moreno Reflects On Anita, Awards And Accents
On Gene Kelly's famous dance scene in Singin' in the Rain, and her early studio experiences
"He had a 103 fever when he was doing that. He was sick as a dog. And the worst part of this is that the set was really outside. ... I can't imagine how he didn't end up, really, with pneumonia.
"But I have to tell you that I visited the set every single day. I did maybe, oh, a week and a half's worth of work on that show. But I visited all the sets every single day. Well, I didn't have that much to do. So I would get all dressed up every morning and go to the studio, go through those famous gates where Jack Nicholson once told me he used to wait for me. He didn't know who I was, but he said, 'You were sooo sexy' ... you know, with that leer of his. And he said, 'You wore these very tight white dresses and you were always very tanned, and I would wait for you.' And he said, 'You'd give me heart attacks.' [Laughs] I kind of liked hearing that."
On playing ethnic roles
[LANGUAGE ADVISORY: The following quote contains language some might find offensive.]
"I became the house ethnic. And that meant I had to play anything that was not American. So I became this Gypsy girl, or I was a Polynesian girl, or I was an Egyptian girl. And finally I decided that by playing all these roles, I should have some kind of accent, but of course I had no idea what these people sounded like so I made up my own, and I now call it the universal ethnic accent. The funny part of it is that all my ethnic characters that I played all sounded exactly the same!
"It got me roles. And you know, for a while, that was wonderful — I was in the movies. But after a while I began to understand that it was really very demeaning. And I began to feel more and more and more diminished. I was already very unsure of myself anyway, because when I was a very young girl in New York City I ran into an awful lot of racial bias, and I got called some pretty nasty names, like 'spic' and — all the words you heard in West Side Story came directly from the streets — 'garlic mouth,' 'pierced ear.' So by the time I was doing those kind of roles — for a living, practically, in Hollywood — I was beginning to feel pretty bad about myself."
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