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By the time he was 25, Olmos had two sons: Mico, from the Spanish mi hijo (my son), and Bodie, named after a ghost town in eastern California. To support his growing brood, he took a job delivering antique furniture between acting and music gigs. By the early '70s, Olmos was landing small parts on shows like Kojak and Hawaii Five-O, often as bartenders and two-bit hooligans. "I was the only person Jack Lord shot in the back, ever," he notes dryly. "That's how bad I was." Then in 1978, during an audition for a play at Los Angeles' Mark Taper theater, he was asked if he would like to try out for Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez's musical drama about the famous "Sleepy Lagoon" case of 1942, in which a group of Hispanic youths were wrongly convicted of a murder.
Olmos was right on the wavelength of "El Pachuco," the strutting, posing, super-macho narrator and mordant conscience of the story. "I spoke in calo, street jive from the streets of East L.A. -- a mix of Spanish, English and Gypsy," he says. "They asked me if I could dance, and I hit a perfect set of splits, turning the brim of my hat as I came up." He got the part.
Zoot Suit, which opened in February 1978, was scheduled to run at the Mark Taper for ten days. It ended up playing for a year before moving to Broadway, where it closed after seven weeks. Olmos' disappointment was soothed by a Tony nomination (he had already won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award and a Theater World award) and the chance to star in the film version of the play, which Valdez also directed. Acting roles came in faster after that. Wolfen (1981) was followed by Blade Runner (1982), in which Olmos played a multiethnic in the year 2019, who he explains, "had German blue eyes, Japanese-slanted eyes, Chinese yellow skin and spoke ten languages fluently."
Olmos' next role was as star of a PBS special, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, a true story about a Mexican cowhand who became the object of one of the biggest manhunts in Texas history, all because of an incorrectly translated word. He threw himself into the part with characteristic fervor, studying old newspaper clippings and photographs for clues to Cortez's inner state. The most audacious touch, perhaps, was the decision to have Cortez speak Spanish throughout the movie -- no subtitles. "I wanted to put non- Spanish speaking viewers in the same predicament as the law-abiding citizens of that community," says Olmos. "I wanted the audience to be in the shoes of Gregorio Cortez."
And he wanted that audience to be enormous. "After the movie aired on American Playhouse, everybody was ready to put it to bed," recalls Tom Bower, a friend of Olmos' who plays the interpreter in Cortez. "For Eddie, it was just the beginning." Olmos devoted an extraordinary five years to making and promoting Cortez, and the effort took a heavy emotional and financial toll. At one point, friends held a fund raiser to help with his travel expenses. Passing up potentially lucrative parts in such films as Scarface, Firestarter, Band of the Hand, Streets of Fire and Red Dawn put a severe strain on the family budget as well.