In both the 1961 and 2021 film adaptations of the musical “West Side Story,” there’s a harrowing scene that drives the tale to its tragic conclusion: The character of Anita, played in the earlier film by longtime Berkeley resident Rita Moreno, enters Doc’s drugstore to deliver a message to Tony that his love, Maria, will meet him later so the pair can flee to safety. As the messenger, Puerto Rican Anita is attacked by Tony’s fellow white gang members, the Jets, who grab her, snarling racial epithets, in an implied sexual assault. It was a scene Moreno felt propelled her to being the first Latina actor to win an Academy Award.

But it came at a high emotional cost.

The EGOT-winning performer, who has said she was raped by her agent during her early years in Hollywood, told The Chronicle about filming that scene as Anita 60 years ago that “I had thought all that was over for me. … All it did was reopen wounds that never healed.”

For those who have seen Moreno speak of her personal experience in the documentary “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It,” there’s an added gravitas to how the scene plays out in the 2021 film, where Moreno portrays a new character, Valentina, Doc’s widow. In the Steven Spielberg-directed film, it is Valentina who stops the attack on Anita, played by Ariana DeBose. And Tony Kushner’s new script leaves no ambiguity about the moment: Valentina calls the Jets “rapists.”

“It’s more violent, it’s scary,” Moreno said of the scene while backstage during a special SFFilm screening of the new movie at the Castro Theatre on Sunday, Dec. 12, before a crowd of young aspiring actors and filmmakers to mark the 30th anniversary of the organization’s educational branch.

Moreno, who turned 90 on Saturday, Dec. 11, described shooting that scene as “bizarre,” but there’s also a sense for viewers that she was making a symbolic correction. In her early days in show business, Moreno was often cast in roles that required her to conform to exoticized, highly sexualized versions of dark-skinned women and was mistreated by powerful men who further demeaned her off-screen. Watching Valentina save Anita in this latest reimagining of the famed musical is like seeing Moreno protect a version of her younger self.

SFFilm Executive Director Anne Lai said the original movie brought Moreno “into public consciousness in a way that nothing else had in spite of all the work she had done,” but what Spielberg and the producers did by making her part of the latest adaptation “feels so full circle.”

For the past decade, Moreno has been explaining her journey as a performer in the framework of the present era, one that has allowed her to talk about the prejudice she faced as a Puerto Rican migrant and Latina. In addition to the 2021 documentary, Moreno released a memoir in 2011, the same year she performed a one-woman show at Berkeley Rep, “Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup.” She called getting to revisit “West Side Story” in Spielberg and Kushner’s racially inclusive, context-driven take on the story “the jewel in the crown” of these projects.

“It’s taken a very, very long time, to say the least,” Moreno said. “The most difficult part of that really is not allowing myself to feel bitter or angry because I have plenty of reason to be. When I hear critics say things like with the documentary, ‘Just think what kind of career she might have had …’ When I first read that, I burst into tears. It reminded me of how really sad a part of me is that I was denied what I feel I had earned.”

Moreno was born Rosa “Rosita” Dolores Alverío in Puerto Rico, to seamstress Rosa María Marcano and farmer Francisco José Alverío. In 1936, Moreno’s mother moved to New York with her daughter. In New York, she took the surname of her stepfather, Edward Moreno, and began studying Spanish dance with Paco Cansino, the uncle of film star Rita Hayworth.

By the time she was a teenager, she had already performed on Broadway and was signed to a contract at Hollywood studio MGM. Moreno’s early roles included parts in now-classic musicals such as Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” which she considers a highlight, but she was more commonly cast in what she described as “dusky maiden roles” such as the enslaved Burmese character Tuptim in “The King and I.”

When she was cast as Anita in the ’61 “West Side Story,” she received acclaim in the film, which also won the Oscar for best picture. But in spite of Moreno’s performance, the film is now seen as containing problematic elements that were a product of its time — notably, of the three main Puerto Rican characters, Moreno was the only Latina, with Natalie Wood, a child of Russian Jewish parents, wearing dark makeup to play Maria.

After winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1962, Moreno did not make another film for seven years. She won a Grammy Award for the album for the television show “The Electric Company” in 1972, a Tony for her role as Googie Gomez in 1975’s “The Ritz,” and Emmy Awards for her guest appearance on “The Muppet Show” in 1977 and on “The Rockford Files” in 1978. But throughout her prolific career, including an acclaimed turn in the HBO prison drama “Oz,” the role of Anita continues to be the one Moreno is most identified with.

“Anita turned out to be for me, at that time, my first role model,” Moreno said. “She’s the first character who is a Latina, had all the qualities that I had always longed for, which was a sense of dignity, a sense of self-respect, opinionated.”

When Moreno, who is also executive producer of the 2021 film, was approached to play Valentina, she couldn’t believe Spielberg was tackling the material. “I thought, that’s either absolutely stupid or insanely courageous,” she said.

“It turns out he didn’t have to be courageous because he knew exactly what he wanted to do. And of course, without Kushner, it would not have been anywhere near the same movie, because he addressed so many political situations that were completely ignored previously.”

Her performance in this year’s “West Side Story” has been already generating Oscar buzz, with Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle calling it “nothing short of career defining.” When she won in 1962, she gave one of the shortest acceptance speeches in history. When asked what she might say if she were to win in 2022, she demurs, instead praising her co-star.

“Ariana DeBose is wonderful in this,” Moreno said. “Actually, she’s a way better dancer than I ever was. That’s not modesty, she’s just terrific.”

That said, Moreno believes the character of Anita is special for anyone who plays the role.

“Everyone who’s ever played Anita — and I’m sure there have been a bunch of them doing road shows of ‘West Side Story’ — I think it stays with you.”

Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TonyBravoSF