Jimmy Smits - Details

JIMMY SMITS, enjoying a diverse career of film, television and stage acting, has completed several feature films since his departure from the highly acclaimed NYPD Blue. They include Wim Wenders’ Million Dollar Hotel, co-starring in an ensemble cast which includes Mel Gibson, Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies, and Carlos Avila’s Price of Glory, in which he played the lead role of Arturo Ortega, a father who attempts to realize his broken dreams as a boxer by training his three sons to be champions.

Well-known for his television acting, Smits has the distinction of having received an Emmy nomination for every year he has been on a series. He earned six nominations for L.A. Law, receiving the Emmy in 1990, and five nominations and a Golden Globe for his role on the hit series NYPD Blue.

Smits studied drama at Brooklyn College and earning an MFA from Cornell University. He has worked in New York on off-Broadway productions and with the New York Shakespeare Festival. Under the direction of Joseph Papp, he appeared in Hamlet, and the Public Theater’s production of Michael Weller’s Ballad of Soapy Smith. He co-starred with Linda Hunt in Little Victories and with Morgan Freeman in Buck, both at the American Place Theatre, and appeared as a guest artist with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and at the Center Stage in Baltimore. On the West Coast, Smits completed a three-month run in Los Angeles on Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden at the Mark Taper Forum.