Rosie Perez's 'View' On Life and Having Great Hair

It’s great that Rosie Perez is one of the new panelists on The View. People Magazine raved, "Rosie Perez is the best thing about the new View."

Coincidentally, I recently listened to her memoir in audiobook format: Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother and Still Came Out Smiling (with Great Hair).

Rosie Perez is a member of the new View panel along with Rosie O'Donnell,
Whoopi Goldberg and Republican strategist Nicolle Wallace.

Much of the autobiography concentrates heavily on Perez’s early years. It’s truly amazing that she came out as such a well-adjusted and compassionate human being – not to mention drug-free – considering that she grew up suffering physical and emotional abuse in a Catholic orphanage and group homes.

Perez’s stays in these facilities were punctuated by visits with her psychologically unstable mother, doting father (who never married her mother) and nurturing aunt.

For someone who became such an accomplished choreographer, it’s amazing that Perez never took formal training of any kind, although she grew up loving music and dancing. Discovered while dancing on Soul Train while attending college in L.A. in the ‘80s, she was recruited to choreograph a music video for Bobby Brown and she soon became an in-demand choreographer for hip-hop music videos and concert tours. 

Perez was so inexperienced and so new to the game that she choreographed Brown's "Every Little Step I Take" video in the living room of her small L.A. apartment.  

She caught the attention of comedian Keenan Ivory Wayans, who chose her to choreograph the female dance troupe The Fly Girls for his Fox variety show, In Living Color. The Fly Girls is where none other than Jennifer Lopez got her start, and Perez goes into detail about their seemingly ongoing feud.

While Perez's dance career took off, Spike Lee plucked her from obscurity when he spotted her in a nightclub and got her into acting, which she had apparently never even thought about before he cast her in his groundbreaking 1989 movie Do the Right Thing.

Perez went on to become an Academy Award-nominated actress, for 1993's Fearless, opposite the legendary Jeff Bridges. Selective about the roles she chose, Perez was able to defy cultural stereotypes and succeed despite Hollywood’s narrow-minded view of Latinas and people of color, in general.

Rosie Perez played Spike Lee's girlfriend in Do The Right Thing.

In her memoir, Perez offers few details about her love life, except to briefly mention that she dated rapper Tupac Shakur and was married to playwright and filmmaker Seth Zvi Rosenfeld, whom she divorced in 2001 after 10 years of marriage. (She married artist Eric Haze last September.) 

She does, however, describe how she overcame battles with depression and how she became an AIDS activist. She spoke about the disease in the early days before it was considered hip and politically correct for celebrities to do so.

I’m sure Perez will continue to break barriers as the first Latina to sit on The View panel, and as one of the too few Latinos in mainstream daytime TV.