Smits is right. Of five hundred roles seen regularly on the box, his character Victor Sifuentes is currently one of six Latinos. Yet the census revealed that in a population of almost 250 million, over 31 million possess Hispanic origins. And the US Labour Department predicts that our white male workforce will plummet to 39.4 per cent of the total over the next ten years. Such statistics confirm what media imagery resists: white middle-class men are becoming America's new minority.

As they vanish, with them goes the brand of all-American machismo handed down from John Wayne to Sam Shepard. These days, actors like Smits - the son of a Puerto Rican nurse and a merchant marine from Suriname - are our new leading men. And, like Eddie Olmos from Miami Vice, Oscar-winner Denzel Washington, or Andy (Godfather III) Garcia, Smits knows he's changing a lot of ideas: about what it takes to be manly and what it means to be an American. Once the country's heroes were stolid, lonely and silent: paragons of existential arrogance and adventure. These days, they are more likely to be thoughtful and even urbane. The new role model has multicultural ties, he is involved in and responsible to the concerns of his community. Where action used to define manliness, now it is symbolised in a work ethic driven by immigrant zeal.

These new images of machismo are being effected not in the movies - still largely loyal to Clint and Mel - but through series television. TV producers like Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, LA Law), Michael Mann (Miami Vice, Crime Story) and Barney Rosenzweig (Cagney and Lacey, The Trials of Rosie O'Neill) have co-opted soap-opera's trick of revealing character week by week. Pitting gradual revelations about a cast's strengths and weaknesses against issues of the day, they discovered the perfect tool for ensnaring a loyal audience. Their work has rejuvenated genre-bound TV -- and given American actors a rich new spectrum of parts to attack. Unlike the film industry, such shows strive to embrace America's ethnic mix. And, as their popularity has grown, such programmes built reputations for the minority actors they hired -- like Philip Michael Thomas (Miami Vice), Michael Warren (Hill Street Blues), Carl Lumbly (Cagney and Lacey), Joe Morton (Equal Justice), and Blair Underwood (LA Law).

But none has come as far or reached stardom as fast as 35 year-old Jimmy Smits. The actor is now entering his fifth year as a regular on LA Law - the most popular show ever conceived by whizzkid Steven Bochco. His character began as a corporate law firm's token idealist, defender of fellow Latinos and keeper of the pro bono flame. Today, he is a partner and the lynchpin of series development. In the machinations of scriptwriters, as well as the hearts of female viewers, Smits' Sifuentes has supplanted not one, but four other leading men. (His 1991 triumph was winning the heart of blonde leading lady Grace Van Owen, the part played by Susan Dey). Nor is his creator's career exactly standing still. This summer, Smits will be also seen in two feature-films: Gillian Armstrong's Fires Within and Blake Edwards' Switch. Fires Within co-stars Greta Scacchi; Switch Ellen Barkin and Jobeth Williams.

Few minority actors manage to take command of a series. And fewer still make the leap to colourblind leading roles in film. Yet somehow it's not suprising Jimmy Smits has managed both. Six foot three inches tall, with cafe-au-lait complexion and a rangy, athletic frame, his matinee idol status comes easily enough. Most such TV hunks seem less real men than advertisements for their sex. But Smits takes a different tack: he undercuts his flamboyant looks with a restraint that borders on reserve. His energies are attentive as much as they are dynamic. And the confidence of this acting style - focus over flash - gives him an edge in projecting both depth.and hidden emotion. Smits is the "new man" par excellence.

On a sunny Los Angeles afternoon, chasing herbal tea with a Winston Light, he also proves a cultured, articulate interviewee. A somewhat downbeat dresser (Sifuentes' immaculate on-set suits are offset by out-of-shot sneakers), he's clad in a black cotton shirt and weathered jeans. The actor is more ebullient than his small-screen alter ego. But two qualities shine through the smiles: Jimmy Smits is mucho ambitious, and more than a little impatient.

Perhaps it is because he struggled to be an actor at all. Born July 9, 1955, in a Spanish-speaking Brooklyn home, by 18 Smits became the head of an all-female household of three. At 19, he fathered a daughter, whose mother he married while finishing college. They also had a son, now 6 - and Smits supported this family while he worked his way through graduate school in drama at Cornell. He moved on to regional rep, then earned a string of roles in daytime soap operas with fanciful names (in All My Children Smits played a monk, in Another World a bartender, in The Guiding Light a soldier, in One Life to Live a crook). In 1984, he landed a spot on television's Miami Vice, as Don Johnson's Cuban partner Eddie. But the partnership proved short-lived; despite a pregnant wife, Eddie was blown away just minutes into the action.

Finally, in 1986, Smits won himself an audition for NBC's LA Law. Given ten minutes to scan a 3-page script in legalese, he blew his initial chance. But upscale lawyer Sifuentes was a part Smits wanted badly. So he caught a budget flight to LA, prepared all over again, and read in front of the show's creators, Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher. After "hundreds' of awful auditions, says Fisher, they knew Smits was the perfect choice. "He was a bingo, an absolute yes. He had everything that we wanted: poise, comic potential, great dramatic timing." He got the part - and the boy from Brooklyn became a major-league, Hollywood star.

Initially, says Smits, the transformation sent him reeling. "Since I started working onstage, my game plan was to make a mark there and maybe do some films. But always come back to theatre. I never thought television would or could be a long-term commitment." Still, it has been five years since Smits and his girlfriend, actress Wanda De Jesus, set up house in Los Angeles. (The breakdown of his marriage, dissolved in '87, meant Smits' two children remained behind in New York.) And he still finds the city strange. "It was very weird moving here. It's real spread out, a car-centered culture. There's no pulse you can feel in LA. And the business is just everywhere, it's incredibly incestuous."

The reality of series TV also came as a shock. Series stars are omnipresent American celebrities, feted across the media and rewarded with tremendous sums. But the actors who create TV enjoy little of the everyday life it portrays. An hour-long show such as LA Law is half the length of a movie - yet it will be filmed in 10 or 11 days. Procedures are rushed, rehearsals are scanty and scripts are changed up to the very last second. Says Smits, "Every day you're up for work at 4 or 5 am. And you might get off that night - or you might shoot right until two in the morning. It's very tough to have a life."

On top of diminishing private time, Smits found himself aggrieved by the hype which surrounds a successful show. Yet even as he complains about fans who stalk him in the supermarket, he knows they provide the passport to wider choice in his work. Once he was just a single actor struggling away on his own. With LA Law, he became a team: the focus of agents and management and NBC press representatives. Now, he speaks of "Jimmy" as if this stellar self were a separate person.

Despite this linguistic peculiarity, Smits remains a down-to-earth guy. He's anchored by his girlfriend, by his family back East, by his working-class roots. And when it comes to work, he's grounded in the acting techniques he learned as a student. This discipline and college training sets him apart in Hollywood -- and few of his colleagues can boast a more impressive sense of assurance. "Learning to use that intuitive, emotional thing is important. But to understand dramatic structure, to learn what literature really is; those things are valuable, too. So I'm a big one for education. In this business, I don't know what I'll get the chance to try. But I do know that, as an actor, I feel equipped for any role."

Hard work and discipline helped Smits escape the Brooklyn streets of his youth. And now that he has arrived, they help him keep a grip on what he wants. "It's EASY to get complacent here," he says, shaking his head. "The money's good and the beach is close and people tend to settle for less. You can get caught up in that and then start telling yourself, 'It's OK, it's OK'. And, all of a sudden, your own standards are not quite what they were." Distrust of this West Coast laissez-faire makes Smits a driven man, one who fears TV as much as he loves what it lets him do.

Determined to prove his mettle, the actor drives himself to exhaustion. He's even made three full-length movies (Old Gringo, Glitz and Vital Signs) during the filming of LA Law. But it is his forthcoming pair of films which should give Smits his real wide-screen break. Directed by My Beautiful Career's Gillian Armstrong, Fires Within stars the actor as a Cuban political prisoner. Released after years in jail, he traces his wife (Greta Scacchi) and their young daughter to Miami. There, hopes for a family reunion fade in light of her new romance - and the vicissitudes of time. Says Smits, "I liked it because it's about people coming to terms with choices that they've made. Choices they might not make again. But I'll have to wait and see how we did. There was always this little problem mixing politics with the amorous thing."

A very different script is Blake Edwards' film Switch. In this light comedy, a womanising Smits is reincarnated as a female - played by Sea of Love's Ellen Barkin. Advance word on the picture is good, and critics claim the Smits-Barkin double act is a treat. The actor says he enjoyed the role partly because of his co-star's talent. "To get to work with Ellen was great;.she's such a well-trained actress. And this will show her in quite a nice light. For so long, she's been tormented and anguished - and, really, her comic timing is great."

"I went in slightly nervous," he adds, "because, on film, I had never done comedy. I'm kind of perceived as a straight man" The chance to widen his brief was one reason Smits lobbied to do the film. And also because, in the script, his character was not Hispanic.

As an actor and as a celebrity, Jimmy Smits keeps his own counsel. He's accrued Emmy nominations, an 'Imagen' award (from the Hispanic Media Task Force) and international fame. But, though he describes every project as "fun", it's obvious he feels most comfortable as a critic. "People say 'It's really great to be in a TV series'. I say considering what TV is, I could have wound up in a much worse situation. Minute for minute, I think we give a good 47 minutes out there. But ten years from now, I expect a lot more from the group I've been working with."

It's no more than he expects from himself. Smits will never be out of work, says a female NBC executive: "Hollywood is just like life; there aren't enough good men. Everybody needs them, every piece, every script, every movie. Jimmy is a real leading man, and that makes him a hot commodity." But more than work, says the actor himself, he wants control of his contribution. "For minority actors, women included, developing our own projects has to be the eventual path. We have a lot of stories to tell and a really unique voice. But none of that is going to be heard as long as we're just the hired hands, acting."

Smits has always been anxious. From his screen progress to his children's education, he tends to worry relentlessly. He worries about censorship. He worries about "the role-model thing". And he worries "Jimmy" might have stayed away from theatre work too long. More than anything else, however, Smits worries about whether he does enough. It's as if, should he stop for a minute, his whole career might evaporate. In some ways, he's still that would-be actor who had to be twice as good as the Anglos.."Change," he says, with a sweeping gesture, "is very hard to effect. In America particularly, change only comes out of money. People don't wake up and say, 'Our country embraces so many cultures!' Instead, it's corporations who go 'Hey, look at that market out there!'"

"But that's OK," he smiles. "You just take that and you use it. It's a ripe time to implement change. And I'm in there trying; that's all I can say."