Shelley Morrison

Born Rachel Mitrani in the Bronx to Spanish-speaking Sephardic parents, she spoke Spanish before English. She played Sister Sixto in The Flying Nun and, for eight seasons, Rosario Salazar on Will & Grace.

Who was Shelley Morrison?

Shelley Morrison was an American actress best known as Rosario Salazar, the sharp-tongued housekeeper of Will & Grace, and as Sister Sixto in The Flying Nun. Born Rachel Mitrani to Sephardic parents, she grew up speaking Spanish at home, the language of her family’s Sephardic heritage.

A Sephardic family in the Bronx

Rachel Mitrani was born on 26 October 1936 in the South Bronx, New York, the daughter of Hortense and Maurice Mitrani, a clothing manufacturer. Her parents were Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews who had come to the United States from Spain, and Spanish was her first language. When she was ten, the family moved to Los Angeles. She studied journalism at the University of Southern California before turning to acting.

A long career

Over more than five decades, Morrison appeared in some twenty-five films and around two hundred television episodes. In the late 1960s she played Sister Sixto, a Puerto Rican nun famous for mangling English, in The Flying Nun. She had a recurring role on General Hospital and voiced Mrs. Portillo in the children’s series Handy Manny.

Because she spoke Spanish fluently and was often cast as Latina characters, she played a maid or housekeeper more than thirty times. She had told her agent she wanted no more such parts when the role of Rosario on Will & Grace came along. Written as a single appearance, the character was so popular that Morrison played her from 1999 to 2006, becoming one of the show’s best-loved figures. When the series returned in 2017, she chose to retire instead.

Death and legacy

Shelley Morrison died in Los Angeles on 1 December 2019, at eighty-three. Her story is a reminder of the many Sephardic families who brought the Spanish language of their ancestors to America, and of how that heritage, carried by the Jews of Spain through five centuries of exile, found its way onto American television.