Life’s a SAG for living legend Rita Moreno…
The 82-year-old Puerto Rican actress/singer/dancer, a Grammy, Oscar, Golden Globe and Tony Award winner, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 20th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on Saturday night.
Moreno accepted the special prize from Morgan Freeman, who called the West Side Story star his “dear old friend,” as well as a “world-class actress, singer, dancer and fighter who battled to break through the racial and sexual barriers that plagued Hollywood‘s Golden Age.”
Moreno did a victory lap onstage after receiving a standing ovation before saying that she was “f—ing thrilled,” but the audio had been was cut during the live broadcast when she dropped the F-bomb.
She later apologized for “that word” before saying, “Actually, I’m not.”
Alluding to her surprised acceptance speech for her Oscar, she said she still honestly can’t believe she’s received SAG’s honor.
Moreno, who briefly flirted with Jeremy Renner and Brad Pitt, also said she hoped she was receiving the Life Achievement Award “early in the third act of my life.” She finished by singing several lines from “This is All I Ask.”
A showbiz veteran and a SAG member for more than six decades, Moreno is one of only 11 people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony — a feat known as the EGOT.
She first appeared on the big screen in the reform-school drama So Young, So Bad in 1950, and afterward was put under contract as an ingenue at MGM, where a casting director changed her first name to Rita.
Moreno’s first film for the studio was the Mario Lanza musical The Toast of New Orleans, and she had a small role as the flapper actress Zelda Zanders in Singin’ in the Rain two years later.
She would go on to star in such films as The King and I, West Side Story — for which she won her Oscar in 1962 — and Carnal Knowledge.
Moreno won her Grammy for The Electric Company Album in 1972, her Tony for The Ritz in 1975, and her two Emmys for appearances on The Muppet Show and The Rockford Files in 1977 and 1978.
She continues to stay busy, having just finished a run as Fran Drescher’s mother in the TV Land comedy Happily Divorced.
She will appear next in the upcoming indie drama Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks with Gena Rowlands.
