Moreno struggled on road to blazing a trail
Actor details peaks and valleys of her career in new film
At 89, Rita Moreno has a lot of stories to tell. She hasn’t slowed down long enough not to. And while she’s reflected on many of them before, recounting much of the significant ones in her 2013 autobiography, “Rita Moreno: A Memoir,” she wasn’t quite prepared the first time she saw a cut of the documentary about her life.
“I literally went: ‘Wow, what a life I’ve had,’ ” she recalled. “It kind of surprised me in a way. You live your life thinking it’s just your life. And then somebody comes along and says, ‘Oh, no, it’s so much more than that. And it represents so much more than that.’ ”
“Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, explores the peaks and valleys of her personal life and decadeslong career that broke barriers even while being stifled by them.
Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the 90-minute film traces Moreno’s extraordinarily full life: her humble upbringing in Puerto Rico, the splitting up of her family — and the ensuing culture shock — when she moved to New York City with her mother as a young child, her struggles navigating Hollywood’s sexism and racism to forge a lasting career, and the turmoils of her most significant relationships, namely a tumultuous eightyear love affair with actor Marlon Brando that drove Moreno to attempt suicide, as well as her nearly five-decade marriage to cardiologist Lenny Gordon, who died in 2010.
What emerges is a portrait of resilience and of a woman, eventually and
resoundingly, finding her voice.
“I really wanted to have Rita be that inspiration to women that have gone through the same fights that she has been going through throughout her life,” says Pérez Riera.
Moreno allowed the director to follow her over seven months at various locations, including her home in Berkeley and on the set of the “One Day at a Time” reboot, in which she portrays matriarch Lydia Alvarez.
The act of reflecting on her life for this legacy project, she says, wasn’t a difficult process, which she attributes to the years in therapy she’s already spent assessing different areas of her life story.
“The hardest thing I ever did was learn to love myself,” she says. “And it’s so important to look back and reflect because you can
still learn something. More often than not, the kind of things I realized when I look back is, ‘Oh, that’s why that happened’ or ‘That’s why I did that.’ There’s power in that. It keeps you moving forward.”
And if anyone has moved forward, it’s Moreno.
She’s in the elite club of EGOT winners (people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony). She’s received the Peabody Career Achievement Award and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime contributions to American culture. And she has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts.
There’s still more ahead. Perhaps still best known for her turn as Anita in 1961’s “West Side Story,” the veteran actor will appear in
Steven Spielberg’s remake of the classic musical — slated for release later this year — in a different role.
But Moreno’s road to blazing a trail for Latino actors who came after her wasn’t without its struggles. The documentary digs into the decades of typecasting Moreno endured early in her film career, often playing Latina “spitfires” or cast as the resident “native girl” with an accent.
“When I went to Hollywood, I really learned where I stood in the world, and it was so sad and frustrating,” she says. “There is something so awful about, if you were a performer, asking your agent to submit you for something and the people won’t even see you because they think you’re too Spanish or something. It’s so frustrating and you want to run and knock their door down and say: ‘Look, let me read this scene for
you. I’m good. I’m really good. Let me. Watch me. Listen to me.’ And you can’t do that. It was also so embarrassing to me that my agents kept getting turned down. I remember thinking, ‘Well, they’re probably not crazy about me as a client because I don’t work much.’ ”
Even after winning the Academy Award for “West Side Story” — and earning the distinction as the first Latina to win an Oscar — Moreno’s career didn’t experience a boost. She didn’t have any significant acting credits for nearly a decade, partly because she refused to play roles she felt perpetuated stereotypes. While some progress has been made in the years since then, Latinos remain greatly underrepresented in the entertainment industry.
“I don’t think our community has moved a whole lot in the eyes of
Hollywood, and we’re all talking about that constantly,” Moreno says. “We have a long way to go. I don’t think that, in my lifetime, I’m going to see that change — I really don’t. I mean ... I’m 89.”
Some of the more harrowing parts of the film are when Moreno recounts the sexual harassment she often faced as an ingénue in Hollywood. One of the most shocking stories she describes is being raped by her agent.
“I never expected to talk about that,” she says. “It’s not exactly something like, ‘Oh, here’s one of the things I want the world to know.’ I was very hesitant because, believe it or not, though I am a rather direct person, there are certain things that are taboo simply because of the age in which I lived.”
Moreno says she’s grateful to have lived to bear witness to the collective power of the #MeToo movement and the conversations it has provoked.
“I think the #MeToo movement has played an enormous part in almost every woman’s life,” she says. “I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime. Women are getting stronger; there is a lot of bravery taking place. Women really think so differently now than they did when I was a girl. Oh, my God, I’m 89 and think of all the stuff I’ve seen and heard and experienced. I hope things only get better. It’s not just important for women; it’s important for men too. Men still have a great deal to learn, and there’s nobody like a determined women to show them and teach them.”
In the meantime, this determined woman has another lesson in mind for anyone who watches the story of her life. And it’s this: “It pays to dream and it pays to pay attention to your dreams. And there is an absolute payoff to hanging on and being stubborn and just falling down and getting up.”
“The art of acting is the art of exposing, an emotional unveiling before others,” writes Viola Davis, in her heartfelt introduction to Cicely Tyson’s memoir, “Just as I Am.”
It’s hard to think of a better description of this book; reading it feels as if you’re sitting in Tyson’s regal presence, hearing her tell stories about her life as a Black woman in America; an Emmy- and Tony Award-winning actor; a daughter, a mother, a wife. By its end, and long before that, you’re in awe — someone truly remarkable has unveiled herself to you.
Just two days after the book’s publication, Tyson died at 96; with an actor’s impeccable timing, her work seemed finally done. But what a gift this book leaves behind. Written with Michelle Burford (named on its cover and credited as “collaborative writer”), “Just as I Am” was a long time coming. Most memoirists don’t wait until their 90s, but Tyson knew the power of a long pause before a curtain goes up. “Here in my ninth decade,” she writes, “I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.”
Her true age may be a surprise for many readers: At the beginning of her acting career, in her early 30s, an agent urged Tyson to shave a decade off her official age. Only upon receiving a Kennedy Center Honor in 2015 did she widely and proudly reveal her real age: She was 90 at the time, not 80. “For me, it was not a matter to be ashamed of,” she writes in the book. “It was a journey to delight in.”
That journey began in the South Bronx and East Manhattan, where Tyson was the second of three children born to William and Fredericka Tyson, young immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. The family was poor — “a reality I see most clearly in hindsight,” Tyson writes, remembering beautiful clothes and delicious meals made by her mother, though she gradually came to realize the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage.
Though her portrait of her parents isn’t prettified — her father was a philanderer, her mother had a violent temper — it’s always loving, filtered through understanding brought by years. She reminds her reader that her parents are part of a centuries-long story: the mistreatment of Black bodies and spirits in America, scars still borne from the era of enslavement. “This is the painful history my parents were born into,” she writes. “And it is only against this backdrop that their many choices and faces can be understood.”
Tyson grew up a skinny, quiet girl, and her talents weren’t immediately visible — though a chance to sing at church, at 7, was an early indication of a love of performance. “All I knew was that when I was
By Cicely Tyson; HarperCollins Publishers, 432 pages, $28.99
up there on that chair, my Mary Janes dangling, my voice rising up from someplace deep within me, I felt a rush. The Spirit, twisting and failing and arching its back, had shuddered through me. And as it did, my shyness vanished.”
But she didn’t become
an actor until much later; a teenage pregnancy, an early marriage and clerical work took precedence for many years. And then, things happened just like in the movies: One day, at a department store, a well-dressed stranger suggested she try modeling school. Though nearly 30 and only 5-foot-4, Tyson quickly became successful at her new career and was soon offered a movie role through her agent. At the time, she’d seen exactly one movie in her life: “King Kong,” which “scared the spit out of me . ... No way was I going to get involved with the film business,” she remembered thinking. Luckily for all of us, she was quite mistaken.
“Just as I Am” takes us through Tyson’s acting training (and a horrifying assault from a prominent acting teacher) and a long career divided between stage and screen, always determined to avoid stereotypes
and portray Black women with dignity and grace. We learn about her art — “Acting, like every art form, is meant to transport its beholders, and the artist is frequently the first to make the journey” — and join her on sets: “Sounder,” for which she received an Oscar nomination; “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” with the Emmy-winning performance that on some days required six hours of makeup; the phenomenon that was “Roots”; and many more. I might have wished for more about “How to Get Away With Murder,” on which an electric Tyson played Davis’ mother in occasional appearances for six seasons, but that role gets short shrift; perhaps Tyson sensed by that point that time was running out.
Though her New York Times obituary noted that Tyson was generally reticent about her personal life, she’s literally an open
book here, writing about her long relationship and eventual marriage to troubled jazz genius Miles Davis (“the Miles I knew was sensitive and ailing, bruised by the hurts this life metes out”), her love for the daughter whose real name she does not reveal, her friendships, her exercise routine, her joys, her griefs. It’s a life lived in all its fullness, and reading it reveals to us — as great actors do — a complete person, one we miss once the book is closed. Doubly so now.
“We don’t have long here, children,” Tyson writes, on the occasion of Miles Davis’ death, in words that resonate all the more after her passing. “Our hopes and aspirations may feel limitless, but our days are finite, our experiences fading in the twinkling of an eye. Death is a love note to the living, to regard every day, every breath, as sacred.”
‘Just
as
I
Am’