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GROSS: Rita Moreno, I want to ask you about another scene. And when I saw the film recently and saw George Chakiris, this beautiful guy, Greek guy (laughter) who looked like he had fallen into a bucket of mud, I just started - I started to giggle. And nobody paid attention, and that was that.
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Some of us are Taino Indian, which is the original Puerto Rican. We're all, you know, many, many different colors. The thing that really bothered me the most is that they put the same very muddy, dark-colored makeup on every Shark girl and boy. MORENO: They made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us obviously don't have them. TERRY GROSS: Did you have to do anything to look more, act more or sound more Puerto Rican? So as a result, the Sharks - gosh, there were just a few of us, really, who were truly Latino who were able to get the part. They were a lot like in a way like the street dancers years later, the kids who danced on their backs and all that kind of stuff, who had talent but didn't have the training. The reason there weren't any, I am surmising, Is that a lot of Latin kids - Latino kids in those days didn't have the money to take those kind of classes.
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RITA MORENO: The reason was that there simply weren't enough Hispanic - forget Puerto Rican - Hispanic male and female dancers at the time who could do the kind of professional job that was needed for Jerome Robbins' choreography, which is, you might have noticed, extremely complex and very difficult. She was one of the few actors playing a Puerto Rican who was actually from Puerto Rico. Now we're going to hear an excerpt of our 2001 interview with Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita.