Rita Moreno is one of only 10 performers to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.

But one award stands out.

“The Oscar has to be the most thrilling,” she said from her home in the East Bay Area. “The most meaningful is obviously the Presidential Medal of Freedom (granted by President George W. Bush in 2004). The Oscar was the first acknowledgement of my work. This little Puerto Rican girl comes out of nowhere and gets this astonishing award? It's an honor and a privilege.”

Moreno, 77, will perform a cabaret act reflecting on her life in show biz Saturday for the season opening event of the Annenberg Theater.

She'll sing songs from her stage and film career and demonstrate her acting skills.

“Every song has a set-up of some kind, whether it's the context in which it was originally done in a Broadway musical or the stories about the people who composed the music,” she said.

“For me, I become the person who sang those words. I am essentially an actress who sings.”

Moreno, born in Humacao, Puerto Rico, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the Puerto Rican girlfriend of a gang member in “West Side Story.”

The 1961 musical has been ranked No. 41 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 top movies of all time, No. 2 among its greatest musicals and No. 3 among its greatest love stories. Moreno's character, Anita, sang “America,” which ranked No. 35 among its greatest American movie songs.

Moreno calls that her favorite role, but she says it stereotyped her for years.

“It took me seven years to do another movie that I would accept,” she said. “It was the tail end of Westerns and I was still doing those Conchita-Lolita roles or Indian maidens. It was a heartbreak for me. I thought I was going to come to Hollywood and be the next Elizabeth Taylor.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. I have my Oscar, I have my Golden Globe. I'm not taking any more of those roles.' It wasn't that I didn't want to play an Hispanic, I didn't want to play a stereotype.”

Kaye Ballard, who co-starred with Moreno in the 1976 film “The Ritz,” says she believes Moreno's best role was Googie Gomez in “The Ritz.” She won a Tony for the Broadway version and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for the film.

Moreno says proudly she invented that Puerto Rican singer with chutzpah to spare.

“We were doing bits on ‘West Side Story' on a 10-minute break,” she said. “People were doing funny stuff and I said, ‘OK, here's a Puerto Rican girl auditioning for a bus-and-truck (production) of ‘Gypsy.' Off the top of my head I did (with a Puerto Rican accent), ‘I had a dream, a dream about ju, baby.' The kids were falling off their chairs laughing.”

She later did the bit at a party attended by playwright Terrence McNally.

“I did her doing the Player King speech from ‘Hamlet' with that accent,” she said. “Of course, I did ‘Everything's Coming Up Roses' and then I did ‘Hiawatha.'

“Terrence McNally was just holding his sides. I didn't even know who he was. He came up to me and said, ‘I am going to write a play for that character.' Imagine that? I got the script almost a year later, and he absolutely nailed her. He remembered what I had done and it was a done deal.”

She's also particularly proud of one other award. She was the first Hispanic woman to earn an Oscar, and Ricardo Montalban's Nosotros organization recognized her as a Hispanic pioneer.

“A lot of Latino actors and actresses call me ‘the pioneer' because I was there years before Jennifer Lopez or Andy Garcia,” she said. “I was alone for a lot of years.”