Looking back with Rita Moreno

Rita Moreno is a member of EGOT, one of the most exclusive clubs in show business.

The acronym refers to names of the major entertainment awards (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony), each of which Moreno has won over her more than 60-year career.

Now at 80, she is not resting on her laurels. Moreno is revving up for a one woman show called "Life Without Makeup," releasing a new CD, an autobiography and playing Fran Drescher's mother on TV Land's "Happily Divorced."

With all of that she will also be the inaugural speaker at �VOZ! Congreso, a new stage series at the Kimmel Center featuring intimate conversations with Latino celebrities and intellectuals. Moreno will present "My Life from Zero to Sixty Plus Twenty."

Last week, Moreno was still on the West Coast filming "Happily Divorced" when EDGE got twenty minutes with her between scenes.

Her first serious role

Asked about her upcoming performance at the Kimmel Center, she said she immediately said yes when asked.

"They called my agent about it and I said sure, this sounds good. It is going to be a preview, actually, of my one-woman show," Moreno said.

She's looking forward to being back in Philly, recalling that she did her first stint as a serious actor there.

"At Philadelphia's Playhouse in the Park, which doesn't exist anymore. I played Annie Sullivan in 'The Miracle Worker.' There was a wonderful director George Keathley, who told me 'you're going to have to find the right walk for Annie, you walk like a dancer.

"It was the first time I had to figure things out instead of just look pretty, which is all I was doing onstage up to that time. He really started me off as an actress."

About ’West Side Story’

Keathley cast her again as Serafina in Tennessee Williams' "The Rose Tattoo." "I told him I was too young for her and he said, 'Well you won't be when I'm done with you.' So I did it and I got my first theater award, the Joe Jefferson award in Chicago." She won it, though, with some prosthetic assistance -- "ass and chest accessories" from Fredericks of Hollywood -- to change her "little dancer body."

Moreno's iconic performance in the film "West Side Story" was a hard won success too. "I knew that Jerry (Robbins) wanted me and I knew that the director Robert Weiss did. But Jerry informed me that I had to audition for the dancing and my heart was in my throat," she said. "I hadn't danced for years at that point and I was a Spanish dancer, not a modern or jazz dancer, I didn't know those genres at all. So I threw myself into dance class for a month and a half before the audition with hopes that somehow I could pass the audition."

The rest is movie history. Moreno kept dancing after that "I thought, well, if this comes up again I better be in shape. Then, the crazy thing was I never danced professionally again."

Playing Googie Gomez

Some 15 years later, she did, though, easily handle the dancing in Terrence McNally's gay bathhouse farce "The Ritz" where she played Googie Gomez, a nightclub performer doing a gig in a gay bathhouse. Moreno won her Tony Award (Best Supporting Actress in a Play) for her performance, and repeated the role a year later in Richard Lester's film version of McNally's hit farce.

"That was comedy and I choreographed it. Again I was told by the director (Robert Drivas) to come up with something on my own. Things that Googie would do.

"She's very lovable, but very full of herself. Not hubris, really, but she's got balls. So I did steps that would completely fail. She couldn't sing and she couldn't dance. Actually, since that movie, I've done her number ('Everything's Coming Up Roses') at a lot of benefits and have added stuff."

Working with Chris Meloni

In the final minutes before Moreno had to be back on set she talked prison drag.

Along with her stage and film work, a generation of TV audiences know Moreno from her appearances charming musical appearances on "The Muppet Show" (for which she won one of her two Emmy Awards) and, at the other end of the spectrum, her role as Sister Peter-Marie on HBO's grim prison series "Oz." Her most charged scenes were with super hottie bad boy Chris Keller, aka Christopher Meloni.

Moreno said she also came up with some of the story lines for the gritty drama. "I went to Tom Fontana and I said I was wondering what if during one of my therapy sessions with a prisoner... my character had sexual fantasies. She was married at one time before she got her vocation. And his eyebrow shot up and he thought it was a great idea. I thought it would be someone my own age; but he put me with a sexual predator who was not older, but younger than I, and that was Chris Meloni. I thought it was pretty devilish of Tom. But Chris actually has always been proud of the fact that we had good chemistry together," she explained.

"I loved that show and that part. I knew I wasn't going to look exactly pretty in it, and I knew the makeup would be raw. I pondered a lot before I agreed to do it; but it was a real turn in my life. I knew it would be harsh. It did change my career and it gave me new respect as an actor. But I lost a lot of parts in TV, because of how I looked in 'Oz.' And that prison lighting... horrific. Actually, I looked wonderful, but you'd never know it from that show.

"I would go to any opening or cocktail party to let everybody see that I wasn't a wreck," she laughed; then said without a beat: "I gotta go! They are calling me back on the set!"

Rita Moreno appears at �VOZ! Congreso on April 11, 2012, 7:30PM at the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center. For more details visit .