While Rita Moreno landed her first movie role in 1950 (a forgettable teen drama called "So Young So Bad"), she told Variety that she soon became disenchanted with her earliest roles. Native Americans, Polynesians, Southeast Asians, and "Latin spitfires" — you name it, Moreno got those roles. She called it her "dusky maiden period," saying "any character who had dark skin, I got all those parts."

"I was not treated like a serious young actress and that was very hard," she shared. "It dismayed me; I began to feel demeaned, that my dignity was on the line ... I was determined that, with perseverance and faith, at some point someone would say 'This girl has talent' and would cast me in something meaningful."

The role that released her stardom, ironically, was one that fit within her studio-defined wheelhouse: the Puerto-Rican-American Anita in the 1961 film version of "West Side Story." Moreno described Anita as "a young Hispanic woman with dignity, self-respect and enormous strength," and said that the part "became [her] role model after all those years." 

While Moreno did fewer movie roles in the years following her Oscar win for what a 1961 Variety review called a "fiery characterization" of Anita, the acting gigs she did take on were meatier and less dependent on her ethnicity.