![]() Nor did she have any idea about the roles she would end up playing. ‘She’s what I’ve always wanted to be!’ Moreno as Anita in West Side Story. It turned into a stalking situation.” Did she realise beforehand what went on in Hollywood? “I had no idea.” ![]() “He found my phone number and started to call me all the time. Then there was Buddy Adler, who ran 20th Century Fox. But I was horrified.” If Cohn was alive today, does she think he would be in jail for sex offences? “Yes, I think Harvey Weinstein would have had company. “I had just met the man and he said, with his wife in the room, by the way: ‘You better watch out – I’d like to fuck you.’ That may have been the third time I’d heard that word in my life, and I stood there and giggled. Soon after being raped, she was introduced to the notorious sexual predator Harry Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures, at a party. “I was so horrified that all I was able to say was: ‘You’re a piece of work,’ and I got up and left.” “I was examining every inch of his face and his soul and, when his wife went to the bathroom, he came back to the day he raped me and said: ‘You know, I always wished I had made you pregnant.’ She repeats his words, still shocked. ![]() He said: ‘My wife would like to meet you would you have lunch with us?’” For some reason, she said yes. Moreno met him recently for the first time in 70 years. The shameful thing, she says, is that she kept him on because she thought he was the only person in the industry looking out for her. As a teenager, she was raped by her agent. Moreno had a brutal introduction to showbusiness. In 1950, at 18, she signed to MGM a year later, she moved to 20th Century Fox. ![]() She dropped out of school at 15 and by 16 was the family’s breadwinner. At six, she made her professional debut at Greenwich theatre. From her earliest days, she remembers being called a “spic”. When she was four, her mother took her to New York in search of a better life, leaving behind Rita’s father (whom she saw again only once) and brother. Meanwhile, her documentary, Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, is available for digital download on Netflix.Moreno was born in Puerto Rico to a seamstress and a farmer. However, success of another sort was brewing for her as, the year that she broke up with him, the filming began for West Side Story - and now, 60 years on from its original release, Rita will appear again in Steven Spielberg's remake.Īlthough it might seem as though her real-life story is even more of a blockbuster than the fictional romance the movie portrays, interested viewers can catch it at the cinema now. "I knew this man was poison," she reflected. The traumatic episode spelt the end of their intense affair and she started to receive therapy, though she claims she remained "in love with him for a long time after it ended". Marlon, on the other hand, was merely ranting of the botched operation that he wanted his money back. We were locked in the ultimate folie à deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him."Īfter the botched abortion, in which the foetus died but remained lodged inside her, leaving her bleeding "profusely", she was rushed to hospital for an emergency procedure. In her self-titled memoir, Rita recalled: "I almost died from loving him.
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