Who Was Rita Moreno's Husband? All About Leonard Gordon (2024)

Rita Moreno has had a long, legendary career in Hollywood and an equally storied dating history, having dated both Elvis and Marlon Brando, but the EGOT winner had one relationship that spanned the majority of her career — her marriage to Leonard Gordon.

The pair met in the mid-'60s on a blind date and got married in 1965. They welcomed one daughter, Fernanda Luisa Gordon, and were married for 45 years until Gordon's death in 2010.

While their decades-long marriage appeared to be a happy one from the outside, the West Side Story star has opened up about her late husband and the ups and downs they faced in the years since his death.

In the documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, Moreno shared that Gordon was often a "controller" and that she hid some of the truths about her marriage to keep up appearances. "[After he died] I thought, 'It's over. I don't have to answer to anybody anymore,' " she said in the film, per USA Today.

Since his passing, Moreno has said she has no interest in marrying again, even once telling PEOPLE that she would rather "eat glass" than walk down the aisle.

"I come from an era where you were supposed to obey the man in the family," she added of her marriage. "I didn't know how to write a check for the longest time ... it's a silent pact that people very often make."

These days, though, Moreno is happier than she's ever been. "I'm still active and still working," she told PEOPLE in June 2021. "I worry and stress a lot less now because I'm so grateful. I stop and smell the roses."

Keep reading for everything there is to know about Leonard Gordon, the late husband of award-winning actress Rita Moreno.

He was born in New York and worked as a doctor

Gordon was born in March 1920 in New York City. He worked as a cardiologist and internist, before retiring from medicine to be Moreno's manager. He held that role until his death in 2010.

Gordon and Moreno met on a blind date

The future couple met on a blind date in 1964, while Moreno was performing in the short-lived Broadway show The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. They married one year later in 1965.

He and Moreno had one child

Gordon and Moreno welcomed their daughter, Fernanda Luisa Gordon, in 1967. Fernanda was one of the main reasons Moreno decided to stay in the marriage; she didn't want to split up her family. "The thought of making her do without her daddy was anathema to me," she later told Vanity Fair of her rationale at the time.

Fernanda has two sons, Cameron and Justin. "They are my heart and soul. Family is what keeps me alive and happy," Moreno told PEOPLE in 2021 of her daughter and grandsons. "Regrets are a waste of time. To waste precious time on them, especially as you get older, is truly obscene, when there's so much beauty and love and humor in this world."

Moreno considered Gordon controlling

In the decades since his death, the actress has been much more open about her feelings toward her late husband. "The day I wanted to start growing up is when my marriage really became torture for me. And for him," she told the New Yorker in 2021. "My husband was a terrific man, just not a good husband. He was a controller."

Moreno added that she would never have shared these feelings publicly while Gordon was alive — much less in a documentary. "I would never have talked about him without his permission. I couldn't do that," Moreno explained in a post-premiere Q&A session, per USA Today. "And it's entirely possible and probable that he would have said, 'What? Are you crazy? No you cannot.' In a way, having the freedom to do it was really very important to me because we ran quite an extraordinary and successful charade for many years."

Despite her feelings, Moreno says Gordon was "a wonderful person"

After reflecting on her marriage in her documentary, Moreno called Gordon "wonderful" but realized she would have preferred to have been single. "It was just that our marriage didn't work out. I didn't realize how desperately I needed to be on my own," the 80 for Brady star told reporters at the documentary's premiere. "I really didn't realize how I was punishing myself by not being on my own."

She also called him "the love of her life," though she considers Brando the "lust of [her] life."

Moreno was with him right until the end of his life

Though the star was not always happy in her marriage, she was with her husband as his health declined. "I was with him to the very last, including a month in hospital where I slept on a cot and was with him 24/7," she said in a 2021 interview with The Guardian. "It's what you do when you love and respect somebody."

When Gordon died in June 2010, Moreno felt "liberated" and ready for a new chapter. "I got up, cut a lock of his hair, which I still have – beautiful silver hair – and as I left I stopped at the door and I looked at him," she shared. "He was so small and slender and white, and I thought: 'How is it that little wizened person made me so unhappy? Where did he get that power?' It was a mystery to me."