Hollywood actress and now author Rita Moreno shares the story of her remarkable journey through life in her memoir "Rita Moreno: A Memoir".

No one can boast of a better story of success than that of Hollywood actress Rita Moreno. She was born in Puerto Rico and named Rosa Dolores Alverio. When she was 5, she arrived in New York. Over the years, she became a talented dancer and ended up in Hollywood, making her mark in musicals like "Singin' in the Rain" and "The King and I", before winning an Oscar for her unforgettable turn as Anita in "West Side Story".

The beautiful actress now tells the story of her remarkable journey through life in her memoir "Rita Moreno: A Memoir" and talks to NPR about how it all started, her Oscar award and her new book.

On going with her mother to the meeting that launched her career

"We were insanely excited. And first of all, we didn't know what a Waldorf-Astoria was, so we asked around - I mean, you know, people who live in ghettos very often don't get out of them, especially at that time. We went to the hotel and my mother goes to the counter and says to the concierge, or whomever it was, 'We have to see Mr. Louis B. Mayer at the penthouse.' And the [concierge] said, well, you know, 'Take the elevator and go up to the penthouse.' So we get to the elevator and there's no word there that says 'penthouse' so we leave the elevator again, we go back to the lady and say, 'I don't see no penthouse.' And she said, 'Oh, yes, of course. It's PH.'

"So we went back in the elevator, sure enough, we hit the buttons PH and the elevator doors opened up into the suite. I was trying very, very hard at that time to look like my idol, because I had no role models. My idol at the time was Elizabeth Taylor, so I had on the waist cincher, and we boosted my bosom a little bit, and I had the hair just right, the eyebrows, because my eyebrows were a lot thicker then, and interestingly enough within minutes he looked at me and he said, 'Wow! She looks like a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor!' And that was the beginning of my new life, and my involvement with enchantment."

On playing ethnic roles

"I became the house ethnic. And that meant I had to play anything that was not American. So I became this Gypsy girl, or I was a Polynesian girl, or I was an Egyptian girl. And finally I decided that by playing all these roles, I should have some kind of accent, but of course I had no idea what these people sounded like so I made up my own, and I now call it the universal ethnic accent. The funny part of it is that all my ethnic characters that I played all sounded exactly the same!

On winning an Oscar for her performance in West Side Story

"Unbelievable. I just couldn't believe that that was happening to me. Do I remember the moment? Does a bear poop in the woods? (Notice how I censored myself so nicely, so gracefully?)

"But I was sure that Judy Garland would probably win, because she was up for Judgment [at] Nuremburg. It was a straight role, not a musical. And I was so amazed and so surprised. Never even dreamed of doing a just-in-case little speech - 'and I want to thank Robert Wise and Jerry Robbins' - nothing! I didn't even work on anything like that, so when I got up there I did this memorable nonspeech. I said, 'I don't believe it!' And there's this pause, and then I say, 'Good lord.' And then I'm trying to think of something, and then I finally say, 'I leave you with that!'

On why she wrote her memoir and what she learned in writing it

"Somebody said it the other day, and I think it's so on the money - they said '[Your memoir is] really not so much a career book as it is a book of your life, with a career around it.' And I think that's absolutely true. I felt I had a lot of important things to say about the film industry at the time, about how women were treated at the time, how my marriage became quite unhappy after about 10, 12 years and I stuck it out for 46.