Rita Moreno and other Oscar winners returned to the awards season stage at 96th Academy Awards earlier this month, presenting awards to nominees in the category they had won in the past.
The legendary actress joined Jamie Lee Curtis, Lupita Nyong’o, Mary Steenburgen and Regina King on the Oscars stage to present the award for Best Supporting Actress, with each paying tribute to one of the nominees before finally presenting the award to Da’Vine Joy Randolph for The remnants.
“When I saw the photo of myself, as big as it might be, accepting the Oscar, much, much younger… I had tears in my eyes,” Moreno told ET’s Nischelle Turner about the touching moment. “I never, ever dreamed in my wildest dreams that I would win an Oscar.”
Moreno, now an EGOT winner, of course, won her Oscar for 1961 West Side History – becoming the first Latin American woman to win an Oscar.
“I would go, even though I was absolutely certain that Judy Garland would win,” she remembers of the victory ceremony. “And then when my name was called, I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t… I remember saying to myself. ‘Don’t run, it’s not worthy.'”
Despite her early success and now-legendary status, Moreno admitted that she has struggled to get jobs throughout her career, even after winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe – recalling a top agent who even told her that she ” I didn’t have the goods.”
“It wasn’t easy. I cried a lot,” she admitted, attributing some of her difficulties to being Puerto Rican in an industry that, to this day, is still predominantly white.
“I always felt like I had talent – even though I didn’t really like myself,” revealed the actress. “I decided I would go to psychotherapy and hoped I could resolve the self-hatred I felt.”
After working through his inner turmoil, Moreno said he is now able to begrudgingly accept his iconic status. And it’s hard to deny, especially when you have stars like Lenny Kravitz flattering you.
“Oh, Lenny Kravitz went crazy,” said the actress about meeting the rocker at Vanity Fair Oscar Party after the ceremony. “I went to introduce myself to him, because that’s what I do at this type of party… And I said: ‘Hello, I’m Rita Moreno’. And he literally got down on his knees and started to continue. I couldn’t believe it, he was stuttering and mumbling.”
“I will, this is Lenny Kravitz talking bad about me!” she added in disbelief.
As for who she was looking up to at the Oscars, Moreno named one of her fellow presenters.
“Regina Rei, we just hit it off,” she recalled. “We sat in the green room where you wait before being called on stage, and I just loved it. She is an incredible woman. She’s friendly, warm, funny and has a tight belly like a drum. I want to hit her.”
With a career spanning nearly eight decades, Moreno shows no signs of slowing down. As she told ET: “I’m an actress and I want to act more.
For her next role, however, she’s playing against type, as a vengeful high school physics teacher accused of murder in The prank.
“She’s a snake woman,” Moreno said of her character in the film. “She’s the kind of teacher who, when a child makes a mistake, the whole class gets punished.”
The actress added that she “loved every second” playing someone so different from her.
“It’s fun to be a bitch, it really is,” she shared. “I just based it on all the mean women who have been horrible to me over the years… Every single one of them who’s been mean, you know, to a Puerto Rican girl who’s trying to survive. forget it and here is the result.”
So, have there ever been any nasty rumors that Moreno has heard about herself in real life?
“I’m not an internet person, but it was on social media that a guy said, ‘You know, I brought her bags to her hotel room, do you know what she gave me for a tip? And he was right,” she recalled. “But my husband wasn’t around anymore. I didn’t know how to tip, he always tipped. I thought it was a great dollar.”
“So I contacted him and said, ‘Here’s two more dollars,’” she added with a laugh.
Moreno should also appear in My Favorite Things: Rodgers and Hammerstein 80th Anniversary Concert, which will air in North America for one week beginning March 24, celebrating the musical achievements of the famed songwriting duo.
The actress played Tuptim in the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein The king and I, and said he recently read about the pair before their appearance.
“It’s interesting that they were both very strict and conservative people and, in a way, that’s what their music was – except it was brilliant,” she reflected. “They made American culture like nobody else… Nobody understood that part of America, that heart of America, like Rodgers and Hammerstein.”
“So when I was asked to open the second act with a little story about how I played Tuptim, I was delighted to do so,” she added. “It was fun, it was really fun.”
The prank It’s in theaters now.
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