Daily BirthdaysEsai Morales
Born to Puerto Rican parents in Brooklyn, New York, Esai ran away from home at the age of 13 because his mother did not approve of his desire to pursue acting. He attended New York' s prestigious High School for the Performing Arts while living in a group home as a voluntary ward-of-the-state. Shortly after he finished his studies, Esai debuted on stage in El Hermano at the Ensemble Studio Theater and Joe Papp' s production of The Tempest with Raul Julia for New York' s Shakespeare in the Park festival. Other theater performances include Tamer of Horses for the Los Angeles Theater Center for which he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and Oscar Wilde' s Salome with Al Pacino at New York' s Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway. Esai made his film debut opposite Sean Penn in Bad Boys, the 1983 drama about youth violence in and out of prison. His next major film role as 50' s rock musician Richie Valen' s half-brother Bob in the Luis Valdez directed film La Bamba (1987) caught the attention of the entertainment industry and stole the hearts of audiences. La Bamba remains the most commercially successful Latino-themed motion picture to date.
Esai has starred in numerous feature films, television movies and drama series. His credits include the NBC mini-series On the Wings of Eagles where he played Iranian pro-American Rasheed opposite Burt Lancaster, Southern Cross, Dog Watch with Sam Elliott, ABC' s Dying to be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Pena Story (portraying Denver mayor Federico Pena who became U.S. Secretary of Transportation) and Atomic Train, an NBC movie-of-the-week, with Rob Lowe. Esai' s portrayals of ordinary men struggling under extraordinary circumstances and conflicts always rise above convention. In Rapa Nui (produced by Kevin Costner), Esai is chosen to represent his servant class tribe to compete in a contest for control of the island. As an Amazonian rubber trapper, he risks his life in a civil disobedience in the award-winning HBO film The Burning Season – The Chico Mendes Story (with Raul Julia). In the Gregory Nava film Mi Familia, he joins an ensemble cast which includes Jimmy Smits and Edward James Olmos as a loving yet troubled son of a working class Mexican American family trying to achieve the American dream. And in The Dissapearance of Garica Lorca, Esai is a young journalist who returns to Spain in search for the truth behind the death of the famous Spanish poet/playwright.
Describing himself as an actorvist, Esai has combined art and activism to build bridges of understanding. In 1997 Esai co-founded the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts (NHFA), created to advance the presence and quality of Latinos in media, telecommunications and entertainment. He is a founding board member of ECO (Earth Communications Office), a global clearinghouse for environmental information. He' s worked for the Wildlife Preservation Fund in Costa Rica and is active with 'alternative AIDS' and H.E.A.L. (Health Education AIDS Liaison). In the late eighties, Esai used his heightened public profile to organize an Oscar night benefit for El Recate/The Rescue, a Central American refugee service agency. This contributed to the promotion of the concept of benefit events on the film industry' s most important night of the year, which led to the current trend of Academy Award night benefits.
Esai currently resides in Los Angeles.
Esai Morales Facts
| Occupation | Actor |
| Birthday | October 1, 1962 (47) |
| Sign | Libra |
| Birthplace | Brooklyn, New York, USA |
| Height | 5' 10" (1m78) |
Selected Filmography
| My Family | ||
| The Line | ||
| La Bamba | ||
| Paid in Full | ||
| In the Army Now | ||
| The Principal | ||
| Bad Boys | ||
| The Buddy Holly Story/La Bamba | ||
| Freejack | ||
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