|
 
Jimmy Smits, actor
For two decades Jimmy Smits has been a familiar presence to television
viewers, with his roles as Victor Sifuentes on L.A. Law from 1986 to
1991, Bobby Simone on NYPD Blue from 1994 to 1998, and, beginning in
2004, Congressman Matthew Santos the first (fictional) Latino U.S.
presidential nominee on The West Wing. He has also broken ground for
Hispanic actors with his portrayals of those admirable characters, who
stand in contrast to the many negative screen images of Latinos. Smits
began his career as an actor in Off-Broadway plays and soap operas
before playing an attorney on L.A. Law, the role that brought him an
Emmy Award. “As I become more successful,”
he told Gail Buchalter for the Washington Post (February 18, 1990),
“I am aware that it affects other Latinos. It's
imperative that I don't forget the homeboys and the old neighborhood.
But I'm also an artist and an actor. The one thing I want to do with my
career is be versatile--not limit myself.”
Jimmy Smits was born on July 9, 1955 in
the New York City borough of Brooklyn. His father, Cornelis Smits, who
went on to become a manager for a silk-screening company, had come from
Suriname, in South America; his mother, Emelina Smits, a nurse's aide,
had come from Puerto Rico. While Smits was growing up, he was
responsible for taking care of his two younger sisters while his parents
worked. “I was never really young,”
Smits told Gail Buchalter. “I was raised to own
up to my responsibilities.” As their finances
dictated, the family moved back and forth from Brooklyn to the Bronx and
even lived in Puerto Rico for two and a half years, beginning when Smits
was 10. At one point, when Smits was 13 and having a hard time adjusting
to his family's recent relocation from Puerto Rico, he was caught
shoplifting model-airplane parts. “My parents
freaked” when the police notified them, Smits
told Gail Buchalter. “It was very important to
them not to be shamed around the neighborhood, and I had done just that.
My father beat the hell out of me, my mother cried, and I felt awful. I
never stole again.” Smits also found more
constructive ways to deal with the constant relocations.
“One of the reasons I got into acting was, because we moved so
much, I had no lasting friendships,” he explained
to Gail Buchalter. “I wasn't an outgoing kid,
although I did have friends, but I also spent a lot of time alone and
would act out different scenarios to keep myself amused.”
As early as age six, Smits showed a
fondness for doing impressions; he has recalled once banging his shoe on
the kitchen table in imitation of the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev.
His early heroes were the actors Raul Julia and James Earl Jones. He
acted in plays at George Gershwin Junior High School in Brooklyn, and,
while at Thomas Jefferson High School, also in Brooklyn, he left the
football team, on which he had been a linebacker, to join the drama
club. That difficult decision led to his being ostracized at first by
his former football teammates; later, however, the team attended one of
his first performances en masse, occupying the entire first and second
rows of the auditorium and giving him a standing ovation. Upon finishing
high school Smits attended Brooklyn College, earning a degree in 1980
and becoming the first member of his family to graduate from college.
(When he switched his major from teaching to drama, his parents objected
to what they considered an impractical career choice.) During those
years he also performed public service, which ranged from cleaning
streets to tutoring high-school dropouts, so that he could
“stay involved with the community,”
as he told Buchalter.
Meanwhile, Smits faced crises and
challenges in his personal life. When he was 18 his parents divorced,
and at about the same time Smits learned that his girlfriend, Barbara,
was pregnant. Smits moved in with her, and the two later married. Before
divorcing amicably, in 1987, they had two children, Taina and Joaquin.
During his senior year of college, Smits considered going to California
after his graduation to try his luck as an actor in Hollywood. Instead,
he enrolled at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where he earned
a master's degree in theater arts in 1982. Occasionally during that time
he would “wonder if I had made the right choice,”
he recalled to Buchalter. “I would think,
‘Maybe I should have gone to Hollywood. . . .'
But I would have lost the grounding my education gave me, which is why I
always tell kids to stay in school.”
After completing his schooling, Smits
returned to Brooklyn and began appearing in Off-Broadway plays while
driving a cab to help support himself. During that time he also landed
roles in soap operas. In 1984 he appeared in the pilot episode of the
highly popular police drama Miami Vice; his character, the partner of
the detective played by Don Johnson, was killed within the first 15
minutes of the show. In 1986 he played a policeman in the TV movie
Rockabye and a drug dealer in the film Running Scared. He was also seen
that year in an episode of Spenser: For Hire.
Following a disastrous audition in New
York for the role of Victor Sifuentes on L.A. Law, Smits flew to Los
Angeles, California, to audition again this time successfully. The show,
which debuted in 1986, followed the cases and personal lives of lawyers
at a Los Angeles firm, where Smits's character, a Mexican-American, was
a successful associate. “Back in the '30s and
'40s, Latinos [in films] were the lady-killers, the suave lovers. Today,
they're the crooks. And that's why the role of Victor Sifuentes is so
appealing to me,” Smits explained to Merrill
Shindler for the Chicago Tribune (October 16, 1988). “I
saw it as a chance to establish an intelligent, alternative image,
someone who's neither a thug, nor a womanizer.”
In his portrayal of the passionate, dedicated Sifuentes, Smits soon
became a favorite with both audiences and critics and earned an Emmy
Award nomination for each of the six years he spent on the show. (He won
the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 1990.)
While starring on L.A. Law, he also appeared in the TV movies The
Highwayman and Stamp of a Killer (both 1987) and Glitz (1988) and in the
films Hotshot and The Believers (both 1987), Old Gringo (1989), Vital
Signs (1990), and Switch and Fires Within (both 1991). Smits left L.A.
Law in 1991 to pursue more film roles, returning to the series to make
two guest appearances the following year.
After performing in the television movies
The Broken Cord (1992) and The Tommyknockers (1993) and the film Gross
Misconduct (1993), Smits found himself on another television series.
When the actor David Caruso left the police drama NYPD Blue after the
show's first season (199394), Smits took over as the Caruso character's
replacement, Detective Bobby Simone. (A year earlier Smits had been
offered the part of a detective named Flinn on the show; after he
declined, the detective was renamed Kelly, and Caruso was cast in the
role.) With a laid-back manner that contrasted with his predecessor's
fiery personality, Simone replaced Kelly as the partner of Detective
Andy Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz). In an article for USA Today
(November 15, 1994), Matt Roush wrote, “Jimmy
Smits eases into NYPD Blue with an effortless, no-big-deal charisma, a
low-key integrity that not only fills David Caruso's shoes but helps the
entire show walk tall again.” During the second
season of NYPD Blue, Smits and the show's other actors won a Screen
Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by an ensemble cast. The
Bobby Simone character “was the stable emotional
center of [the show's] universe,” David Milch,
the co-creator and executive producer of NYPD Blue, told Peter M.
Nichols for the New York Times Television section (November 2228, 1998).
“The essential decency of his nature allowed the
audience to feel safe to explore the complexities and the woundings and
scarrings of the other characters.” While such
traits made Bobby Simone a likable character, they also, Smits felt,
made playing Bobby a somewhat unfulfilling exercise. “In
some sense Jimmy felt it was a restriction, that it deprived his
character of dimension,” David Milch elaborated.
“The healthy soul must be engaged with the world,
whereas the wounded one can be interesting in its withdrawals. Jimmy
felt the character lacked inwardness in that regard.”
During his tenure on NYPD Blue, Smits
also took on an assortment of other projects, including voice work on
the TV series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child (1995) and
Mother Goose: A Rappin' and Rhymin' Special (1997). He starred in the
television movies The Cisco Kid (1994), Solomon & Sheba (1995), and
Marshal Law (1996) and the films My Family and The Last Word (both 1995)
and Murder in Mind and Lesser Prophets (both 1997). He earned particular
praise for his performance in My Family, the story of several
generations of a Mexican-American family living in East Los Angeles.
“With a deft touch that lightens the story, and
the charismatic presence this film has needed all along, Mr. Smits
almost singlehandedly makes My Family more engaging,”
Caryn James wrote for the New York Times (May 3, 1995). Smits, in her
opinion, gave “a terrific, dominant performance.”
In 1998, after four years on NYPD Blue, Smits decided to move on. (On
the show, his character died of a heart infection.) Caryn James wrote
for the Times (November 24, 1998), “Though his
level-headed approach offered Mr. Smits few opportunities for stormy
acting, it is a huge and subtle accomplishment to have made Bobby so
richly believable.”
After leaving NYPD Blue Smits appeared in
films including The Million Dollar Hotel, Price of Glory, and Bless the
Child (all 2000) and Angel (2003). In 2002 he played the small but
significant role of Senator Bail Organa, the adoptive father of Princess
Leia, in the second Star Wars prequel, Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Although he told the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal (April 14,
2005) that he had probably “spent more time in
the wardrobe department than I did on the set” of
Attack of the Clones, he found the experience sufficiently interesting
to reprise his (now enlarged) role in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
in 2005. “It was fascinating to be there and
watch the world [that George Lucas, the guiding force of the Star Wars
series] has created over the past 30 years. . . . He'll start talking
about it like it's real,” Smits told the
Commercial Appeal. Referring to the phenomenally successful Star Wars
films, whose characters and story lines have taken on the status of myth
for legions of fans, the actor told Sarah Rodman for the Boston Herald
(April 6, 2005), “I'm just excited to be part of
that lore.”
Meanwhile, Smits had also returned to his
first love, theater. He starred in a 2002 production of Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night, in which he played the love-smitten Duke Orsino, for the
yearly Shakespeare in the Park festival held in New York City's Central
Park. While the overall production earned poor reviews, Smits was
thought to have acquitted himself reasonably well. “His
performance may not be memorable, but he conveys the core of the
character very well and gets his laughs,” Robert
Feldberg wrote for the Bergen County, New Jersey, Record (July 22,
2002). “As the painfully smitten Orsino, Smits is
a dashing figure . . . ,” Charles Isherwood wrote
for Variety (July 29August 4, 2002). “With an
equally handsome stage voice, Smits knows how to shape the verse and
certainly savors the language, but the performance, perhaps like the
character, is mostly style.” In 2003 Smits
starred in the Pulitzer Prizewinning play Anna in the Tropics, about a
lector who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to Depression-era cigar-factory
workers in Florida and embarks upon an affair with one of the workers
(played by Daphne Rubin-Vega). “Smits is sweetly
seductive, matinee-idol handsome in a tropical white suit, a man who
rides the passion of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to a different tragic
ending,” Christine Dolen wrote for the Miami
Herald (November 17, 2003), and in the New York Post (November 17,
2003), Clive Barnes agreed that “the effortlessly
accomplished” actor, “stylish,
slightly remote, [and] haughty . . . is superb.”
Smits earned significantly better reviews during his next foray into the
Shakespeare in the Park festival, which, in 2004, featured the actor as
Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. In the Hartford (Connecticut)
Courant (July 15, 2004), Malcolm Johnson enthused that Smits
“makes an amusingly divided Benedick, full of
himself on the surface but less assured within.”
“Who knew he had perfect comic timing?”
a pleasantly surprised Neil Genzlinger asked in a New York Times review
(July 14, 2004). Genzlinger added that Smits “executes
[physical comedy] with a crowd-pleasing fearlessness,”
yet manages to “show a great restraint, playing
to the audience with subtlety rather than . . .
lowest-common-denominator overkill.”
In 2004 Smits joined the cast of another
television series, the political drama The West Wing. At the conclusion
of the 200405 season, his character, Congressman Matthew Santos, emerged
from a deadlocked Democratic National Convention as his party's
presidential nominee and the possible successor to the fictional
Democratic president Josiah “Jed”
Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen). In the 200506 season Santos ran in the
general election against the wily, free-market Republican senator Arnold
Vinick (Alan Alda). The two even faced off in November 2005 in a live
episode that re-created the format of a presidential debate; minimally
scripted, with plenty of room for improvisation, the debate episode was
a hit among viewers and provoked disagreement over who had wonwith one
on-line source reporting that Santos had “edged
out” Vinick and another finding that Alda had
“waxed the floor” with
Smits. The show's fictional voters were apparently of the former
opinion, as Santos won a narrow victory over Vinick to become the first
Latino president-elect. The debate and election did little to revive the
diminished ratings of the long-running series, and in early 2006 NBC
announced that The West Wing would go off the air at the end of the
2005-06 season. Asked by Holly Taylor for Redbook (March 2006) what it
had meant to Smits “to play a politician who's
also Latino and may well be the next president,”
Smits answered, “I got into acting because I've
always believed that with any form of art, you have the ability to touch
people in a profound way. And television can be a huge influence,
especially for young people. The show gives them permission to aspire,
you know? I run into young people all the time who are lawyers now and
tell me the role I played on L.A. Law influenced their decision. That's
a nice icing on the career cake.”
“Ask anyone to describe Smits,”
Gail Buchalter wrote, “and most come up with the
same simple word: nice.” For many years the
six-foot three-inch Jimmy Smits has lived with the actress Wanda De
Jesus. In 1997 Smits co-founded the National Hispanic Foundation for the
Arts, with the aim of helping Hispanics in creative endeavors.
 |
