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The Olmos family history is almost as colorful. Olmos' maternal great- grandparents were, as he puts it, "major" Mexican revolutionaries -- journalists who owned the leading radical newspaper in Mexico City before moving to Los Angeles. Olmos' mother Eleanor Huizar met Pedro Olmos, a young businessman, while visiting Mexico City. The couple married and raised three children: Peter, now 44, Edward and Esperanza, 38.
Olmos, who grew up with an extended family in a small house on Cheesbrough's Lane, still has fond memories of life in the barrio. During a visit to his old neighborhood, he pauses before a vacant lot bordered by a garbage dumper and two dilapidated cars. "Coming back really tore me up," he says. He would like to turn his great grandparents' old wood-frame house into a museum "not out of ego, but to show kids that starting from here, they can go anywhere they want." Yet it took him a while to find his own path. When Olmos was eight, his parents were divorced. It was a painful time, and Eddie took refuge from the street gangs and drugs by concentrating on baseball. It was also a way of sidestepping the legal arrangement that restricted his father to only eight hours with young Eddie every 15 days. "My dad couldn't come to the house, but he could come to the ball park," says Olmos. "At every game I ever played, he was there."
Meanwhile, the Golden State batting champ had been seduced by a new love: music. Olmos taught himself to sing and play the piano and, by 1961, was good enough to join a band called the Pacific Ocean. Sporting hair down to his waist, Olmos was the group's lead vocalist. "I was a terrible singer," he admits, "but, boy, could I scream and dance!"
By the mid-'60s, Olmos was making his way in two worlds. By day he attended East Los Angeles College and California State University, and by night he performed -- sometimes till past dawn -- with the Pacific Ocean, then the house band at Gazzarri's nightclub on Sunset Strip. He began taking acting classes to improve his show. "I started acting to learn how to become a better singer," he says. "Then the whole thing switched on me. I discovered that the spoken word is easier to project than the sung word."
One night a young woman called Kaija Keel walked into Gazzarri's with a girlfriend who had dated Olmos. The daughter of Actor Howard Keel, Kaija (pronounced Ki-ya) had just ended a romance with her high school sweetheart, Actor Jeff Bridges. Olmos found himself drawn to Kaija's "frankness and tremendous sense of independence."
Eddie, a long-haired Chicano rocker, and Kaija, the daughter of a famous actor, had a hard job convincing both their families that they had a future together. "I was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner before the movie appeared," grins Olmos. "It was quite a dinner. They served artichokes, and I'd never eaten one." Even after the couple was married in a small ceremony in 1971, the Keels "weren't thrilled" by the union, says Kaija. "I was very mad at them for a while, but now that I'm a parent, I can understand. They were worried about me going off so young with a crazy person with no money."