[citation needed] Ortiz began his career as a radio and stage actor while still studying at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, sharing credits with Luis Antonio Rivera (Yoyo Boing), Walter Mercado, Adela Villamil, Jacobo Morales and many others.
With Morales, Myrna Vázquez, Marcos Betancourt and Alicia Moreda, Ortiz was a founder of El Cemi Theater Company.
In the 1960s Ortiz was a star in many of the programs produced for Telemundo by Paquito Cordero on a weekly basis, especially 'La Taberna India', in which he played Reliquia, an ancient (although Ortiz was in his 20s) small-town smart aleck lawyer who victimized the everyday countryman (jibaro) played by Adalberto Rodriguez (Machuchal) through money-making schemes created by Reliquia's corrupt mind.
In the early 1970s, Ortiz started the production of his own TV shows at Telemundo, among them the first Astrology-related program starring Walter Mercado and segments designed to showcase the talents of dancing/singing bombshell Iris Chacon, who later became his second wife.
Ortiz was always the writer, director and visionary mastermind of his productions.date=July 2020 One of Ortiz's works, Las Rosas Blancas, a made-for-TV film fantasy/drama musical, starring Charytin, Luis Antonio Cosme, Miguel Angel Alvarez and Ortiz himself, received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award in 1975, after being selected along with 26 other radio and/or TV productions from more than 1,000 entries.date=July 2020 In 1985, he returned to WAPA-TV as a comedian in a show sponsored by Budweiser, known as La Taverna Budweiser, alongside Machuchal, reprising the same type of program they made two decades before in Telemundo.
and El Pueblito Contra Ataca in which he played another old man character, Cheito Boogaloo, who denounced corruption while making fun of political matters.