Smits, Jimmy (1945—)

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Smits, Jimmy (1945—)

Emmy Award-winning television, film, and stage actor Jimmy Smits is one of a very small handful of highly visible Hispanic actors. A co-founder of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, an organization whose mission is to establish opportunities for Hispanic Americans in entertainment, Smits has used his immense popularity and fame—both of which derive in part from his stunning good looks—to publicize the cause of Hispanics and other minority groups in the entertainment industry. An elegant and truthful actor with a persona that combines charm, sex appeal, and vulnerability with a tough and steely inner core, Smits carved a place for himself as an American cultural icon when he was cast in Steven Bochco's landmark television ensemble drama series, L. A. Law (1986-1991) and went on to an even higher profile as detective Bobby Simone in Bochco's hard-hitting cop series, NYPD Blue (1994-1998).

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 9, 1955 to a Puerto Rican mother and a South American (Suriname) father, Smits was raised mostly in Brooklyn, though he did live in Puerto Rico for a short time between the ages of nine and 11. While attending school at Thomas Jefferson High, he made the championship football team, but quit playing to become the star of the school's drama club. He went to Brooklyn College where he got his B.A. in Education, and worked for a while as a teacher before becoming a student again, earning his Master's degree in Theater Arts from Cornell in 1982. After graduating, he traveled around the country working in repertory theater until 1984, when he made his television debut in the pilot episode of Miami Vice. The experience was short-lived: cast as Don Johnson's partner, he was killed in the course of the episode.

Then, in 1986, Smits landed the ongoing part of Victor Sifuentes, Hispanic public defender turned corporate litigator, in Bochco's critically acclaimed and wildly successful L. A. Law for NBC. (The number of law school applications in the United States increased dramatically at the height of the show's popularity). The role of Sifuentes catapulted Smits into stardom, and he became a heartthrob and sex symbol much as George Clooney would in E.R. a few years later. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy every year, finally winning it in 1990, but left the show in 1991 to pursue opportunities on the big screen. However, with the exception of his co-starring appearance, alongside Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck, as a smoldering Mexican soldier in Old Gringo (1989), and a role in the 1997 Chicano family drama Mi Familia (My Family)—both of them critically respected but commercially unspectacular features—he made only a handful of forgettable films.

Bochco and ABC came to the rescue in 1994, when he joined NYPD Blue in its second season. For the next five years, he delivered an elegant, understated portrayal of a quietly complex character, in perfect counterpoint to the explosive acting of Dennis Franz as Simone's troubled, sometimes bigoted partner, Andy Sipowicz. The gritty cop drama was controversial from the outset because of its coarse language and explicit sexual content and, during its first season, many network affiliates refused to carry it. Despite (or maybe because of) this, it was an almost immediate ratings success, as were its sometimes ambiguous lead characters, multi-dimensional and complex, following a trend already set in other cop series such as Homicide: Life on the Streets and Law and Order. Smits was thoroughly convincing as an introspective widower who joins the 15th precinct after months of tending to his dying wife, and who raises homing pigeons as a hobby. However, the fact that Bobby Simone was conceived as being of French-Portuguese rather than Hispanic descent drew some criticism, emphasized by the fact that the only Hispanic officer was played by an actor of Italian heritage (Nicholas Turturro).

In 1998, with his contract up and due for renewal, Jimmy Smits decided to leave NYPD Blue in search of fresh challenges. The challenge to the program in finding a way to write him out resulted in a sequence of tense and tearjerking episodes in which Bobby Simone succumbs to previously undetected heart disease. This turn of events in the plot all but dominated the 1998 series and tested Smits' acting abilities to the limit. He passed with flying colors.

—Joyce Linehan