Musical theater legend and multiple Tony Award winner Chita Rivera has died at the age of 91. UNN writes about this with reference to Reuters.
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Chita Rivera died in New York after a short illness at the age of 91. Her daughter Lisa Mordente announced her death.
The dancer, singer and actress made history by becoming the first Latin American woman to receive the prestigious Kennedy Center Award in 2002. In 2009, she also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Rivera has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards and won twice. In 2018, she also received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement for a career that spanned nearly seven decades.
Famous playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote the book based on Rivera's roles in The Rink with Liza Minnelli in 1984 and Kiss of Spider Woman a decade later, considered it "a walking history book of the golden age of American musical theater.
It was Chita Rivera who played the role of the murderous Velma Kelly in the original 1975 Broadway production of Chicago and created the role of Rose in the surprise hit Goodbye Birdie with Dick Van Dyke in 1960. But it was her portrayal of the feisty Anita in West Side Story, the groundbreaking musical by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, that finally made her a star.
She was born as January 23, 1933 in Washington, DC. Her parents named the girl Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero. Her father, Puerto Rican musician Pedro Julio Figueroa del Rivero, died when she was 7 years old.
One of five children, she studied ballet from an early age and won a scholarship to the George Balanchine School of American Ballet in New York. She was still a teenager when, on a whim, she auditioned with a friend for the touring company of the musical Call Me Madame and won the role.
In 1957, she married Tony Mordente, an actor and dancer on the show. She was so integral to West Side Story that its London production had to be postponed until she gave birth to her only child, Lisa, in 1958.
Rivera's career was interrupted in 1986 when she suffered a compound leg fracture in a car accident in New York City while filming Jerry's Girls. But after physical therapy, Rivera played in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" in 1993, for which she won a Tony Award.
Rivera also made regular appearances in television entertainment shows, including a film version of Chicago in 2002.