West Side Story star Rita Moreno on revisiting rape trauma in big-screen reboot

Actress Rita Moreno, sitting on a couch, February 1954.

West Side Story star Rita Moreno has told of her trauma while filming the 1961 classic and how Steven Spielberg’s imminent reboot changes her role in the scene.

The award-winning performer, who won an Oscar playing Anita in the first version of the film, was left in tears after recording a scene when she is sexually assaulted.

According to Moreno, now 89, the scene reminded her of how she had been raped by her agent when she was just 17.

In a new documentary about her life, called Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, the actress says she was unable to process what had happened for a long time, explaining: “I never assigned the word ‘rape’ to what he did to me until I came to film the documentary.

I thought of it as an ‘attack’? No. I would think he ‘forced himself on me’. I couldn’t give it the proper name until I was filming.

“And it’s an important story because of what it says about me, that I continued to let him act as my agent. I didn’t value myself then.”

Now, 50 years after filming the original, Moreno, who was born Rita Alverio in Puerto Rico, has returned to the scene in a new role in the remake of the famous musical released on Friday.

In Spielberg’s version of the musical, the Oscar-winning actress plays the character of Valentina, who stops the assault of Ariana DeBose’s Anita.

Moreno, who once had a turbulent, passionate relationship with Marlon Brando, said: “It was positively creepy and eerie to remake the rape scene with Ariana as the new Anita. It’s the one scene that I had real difficulty playing. It never got comfortable.”