It's Benjamin Bratt's 35th birthday, and there are 34 long-stemmed ultracrimson roses on his desk—just delivered, still trembling from their arrival. "They're from a lovely lady;" Bratt says in his sexy baritone, looking at the accompanying card and suppressing a smile. Bratt's not the kind of guy you would readily imagine getting giddy, but his delight over the enormous bouquet is obvious. No wonder. Thc "lovely lady" in question is peeking out from an array of snapshots on the bulletin board on Bratt's dressing-room wall, just behind the jungle of roses. And she doesn't just look like Julia Roberrs.
"The woman knocks me out" is all Bratt will say about his girlfriend of nearly two years—for now.
We're at Chelsea Piers, a sports complex in downtown Manhattan that houses an ice-skating rink, a bowling alley and a swimming pool—as well as the set of NBC's Law and Order. After nine years on the air, the show is the longest-running nighttime drama on television and still in the Top 2o in the Nielsen ratings. When Bratt came on board for the departing Chris Noth in 1995, he made a strong first impression, eliciting praise for the quiet dignity he brought to the role of Detective Rcynaldo "Rey" Curtis, a politically conservative Hispanic family man. Fans have stuck by the charactcr, even last season, when he fell into the arms of another woman. (He eventually went back to his wife and three children.) "People would shout at me, 'Go back to her She needs you!'" he says. "It's always both funny and gratifying to see how much people get involved in the show."
As Bratt leans back against the couch in his modest dressing room, it's easy to see what makes Roberts swoon. He is, if possible, prettier than the Pretty Woman, though in a decidedly masculine way. Where does one start? With his perfect full lips? Tiger cheekbones? Velvety black eyes?
"Benjamin is fine," says S. Epatha Merkerson, who plays Lieutenant Anita Van Buren, Curtis' boss. "I always wonder how he manages to be so nice, looking like he does. A guy who looks like that doesn't have to be nice."
Bratt certainly doesn't live up to his name, which could in fact describe many other actors. When you're in his presence, loftierwords than "nice" come to mind—words like "gentlemanly,' even "regal." He's serious and considerate when he speaks, and he wants to talk only about things he thinks are important. "Ben is something of a throwback," says Jerry Orbach, the veteran actor who plays Bratt's partner, Detective Lennie Briscoe. "He's an old-world gentleman. I credit his mother. It was the way he was raised."
The way Bratt was raised could itself be mined as the subject of a movie. His mother, with whom he is very close, emigrated at age 14 from Lima, Peru, with her grandmother, settling in San Francisco, where she met Bratt's father and where Bratt was born. When he was 4, his mother and his father, a sheet-metal worker of German descent, divorced. (Bratt had little contact with his father until recently. "We're getting to know each other again," he says.) Despite being a single parent of five (Bratt is the second oldest), his mother managed to put herself through nursing school. A Peruvian Indian, she also worked tirelessly as an activist for Native American rights. In 1969, she even took the kids along (on weekends) to the 19-month occupation of California's Alcatraz Island by Indian activists who wanted to alert America of Indian suffering and promote Indian self-respect and autonomy.
"At 5 years old," Bratt says, "I had little understanding of the reasons behind the occupation and my mother's participation in it. I will say, however, that it felt like a natural place to be—very welcoming, very much like a village. Only in hindsight can I grasp the fortitude it took her to single-handedly raise five young kids and be as politically active as she was. I am in awe of her strength and will."
Bratt's loving upbringing made it all the more difficult for him to adjust to the culture of Hollywood. He moved there at age 23 after graduating with a BFA in theater from the University of California at Santa Barbara and attending the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. "I was somewhat green when I first moved to Los Angeles," he says. "It took me nearly a year to get used to the Stepford Wives quality that thrives there. I remember the shock at discovering that just because people are nice to you, it doesn't mean they like you."
Still, Bratt persevered and is proud to say that he has never supported himself through anything but acting. He has consistently drawn critics' praise in secondary roles in such movies as Bound by Honor, Demolition Man, The River Wild and Clear and Present Danger. But it's on TV that he has truly made his mark. In 199o, Bratt worked with producer Dick Wolf on NBC's short-lived Nasty Boys, a multiculti cop show set in Las Vegas. Wolf, who went on to create Law and Order, remembered Bratt when Chris Noth's character was written out of the show. "Ben is one of the few actors who can communicate morality,," Wolf says. "He has a Jimmy Stewart quality, which is unlikely, because he couldn't be more different physically."
The person Bratt most resembles is his mother. He has her eyes and her strong political bent. Bratt bristles when the conversation turns to the dearth of acting roles for minorities. "The idea of fair and equal representation for people of color in this business is a joke," he says. "How can we as artists remain optimistic about our prospects when the personification of this industry is an overpampered, self-satisfied, middle-aged white male whose only contact with people of color is the people who clean his house? We can't."
Impatient with the lack of progress, Bratt and his brother Peter, 36, have started producing their own movies. Follow Me Home, the story of a group of street artists, directed by Peter and starring Bratt, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996 and had a limited release. "We can no longer wait for, nor can we fairly expect, someone outside our experience to tell our stories for us," Bratt says. "The fact is there is such a wealth of stories within America's various non-Eurocentric subcultures that it's only a matter of time before they emerge and get told."
Bratt's commitment to political causes was one of the many things that attracted him to Roberts. The actress, who visited Haiti in 1995 as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, has in recent years become more involved in affairs of state and the environment. (In December she went on David Letterman to promote Stepmom but wound up spending almost the entire interview talking about the threatened extinction of the orangutans of Borneo.) "She's smart as a whip," Bratt says with a smile, "so intelligent. You gotta keep up the pace."
Their first "fateful meeting"—the details of which he won't divulge—"has taken on the status of fable," he says. "It's the kind of thing the grandkids would eventually want to hear." Not that they're planning on getting married—yet—despite reports last year that they were hitched after they took a vacation together on the isle of Capri and Roberrs came back sporting what looked like a diamond engagement ring. (It was, Bratt says, just a gift for "my love.")
All the attention that has come Bratt's way since he started seeing Roberts has been, he admits, a bit overwhelming at times. "You have to understand," he says, 'I'm a man who covets my privacy, and I'm going out with the most famous actress in the world." The gossip columns are constantly sprinkled with Ben-and-Julia "sightings": Ben and Julia "canoodling" all over Manhattan, Ben and Julia green-market-shopping, Ben and Julia fighting and then making up outside a movie theater.
It's why they tend to stay huddled in Bratt's Chelsea loft (Roberts lives a quick $4 cab ride away), cooking dinner and watching videos like any other couple. Sometimes, though, things get a little more glamorous—like the night in October when Bratt arranged for a yacht cruise off Kent Island, Md., while Roberts was filming Runaway Bride with Richard Gere nearby in Baltimore, a surprise for her 31st birthday. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack and Carey Lowell joined in for what seemed like a celebration of not just Roberts' birthday but the couple's love. "I have a new circle of friends through my lovely lady," Bratt says with a smile. Somewhere out on the Law and Order set, the sounds of "Happy Birthday" have begun. A cake with 35 candles enters Bratt's dressing room before his singing castmates and the crew step in, all smiles. Bratt stands up, every bit like Jimmy Stewart—lanky, long-legged, speechless and shy. Finally, he says, "Didn't I tell you I was a lucky guy?"