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Alan Alda (born Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo on January 28, 1936) is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award-winning American actor, writer, director and sometime political activist.
He is most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. In the 1970s and 1980s he was viewed as the archetypal "sensitive male," though in recent years he has appeared in roles which counter that image.
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Family and early life
Alda was born in New York City. His Italian-American father, Robert Alda (born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was a successful actor, and his mother Joan Brown was crowned "Miss New York" in a beauty pageant. Their adopted surname "Alda" is a combination of "ALphonso" and "D'Abruzzo." Alda's half-brother, Anthony Alda, was christened Antonio D'Abruzzo on 9 December 1956.
When Alan Alda was growing up, his father ran a burlesque theatre. This led to his schizophrenic mother's suspicions of extra-marital affairs, and eventually her attempting to stab his father in the face. Later on, his parents divorced.
Alda contracted polio when he was seven years old, which kept him bedridden for two years as he received treatments.
He received his bachelor's degree from Fordham University in 1956. During his junior year, he studied in Europe where he acted in a play in Rome and performed with his father on television in Amsterdam. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Army Reserve and served a six-month tour of duty as a gunnery officer in Korea following the Korean War. A year after graduation, he married Arlene Weiss, with whom he has three daughters: Eve, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. He also has a grandson named Scott. Arlene Alda is a well known photographer, author, and clarinetist.
Raised as a devout Catholic, he continues to attend weekly mass and celebrate religious holidays and events. His specific religious beliefs are difficult to define.
He is also an activist for feminist causes, and has been for many years.
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Acting career, fame, and M*A*S*H
Alda began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Compass Players comedy revue.
In the 11 years (1972–1983) he starred in M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, winning five. He wrote (or co-wrote) 20 episodes, and directed 30 episodes. When he won his first Emmy Award for writing, he was so happy that he performed a cartwheel before running up to the stage to accept the award. He also was the first person to win Emmy Awards for acting, writing, and directing for the same series. Interestingly enough, Richard Hooker, who wrote the novel on which M was based, did not like Alan Alda's portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce (Hooker, a Republican, had based Hawkeye on himself, whereas Alda took the character in a more left-wing direction). Hooker, in fact, did not care for the show in general. Alda also directed the show's 1983 2½ hour finale "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" which remains the most watched episode of a TV series.
As more and more of the original series writers left the series, Alda gained more control and by the final seasons he had become project and creative consultant. Under his watch, M*A*S*H more openly addressed political issues, often to the point of "preaching" to its audience. Some fans prefer the greater emotional and political depth explored in the later episodes to what they view as the more superficially comedic early years, while others have criticized Alda for taking more creative control of the series, feeling that the political sympathies he imbued the show with got in the way of writing quality stories.
As a result, the 11 years of M*A*S*H are generally split into two eras: The Larry Gelbart/Gene Reynolds "comedy" years (1972-1977), and the Alan Alda "dramatic" years (1977-1983).
During this time, Alda frequently appeared as a panelist on the 1968 revival of What's My Line?. He also appeared as a panelist on I've Got a Secret during its 1972 syndication revival.
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After M*A*S*H
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Alda's prominence in the enormously successful M gave him a platform to speak out on political topics, and he has been a strong and vocal supporter of women's rights. In 1976, the Boston Globe dubbed him "the quintessential Honorary Woman: a feminist icon" for his activism on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. As such, he has been a target for some political and social conservatives.
He has also appeared in at least two TV commercials. Both of these were in the small-computer industry, first for Atari and later, with the rest of the M cast, for IBM's PS/2 product line with MicroChannel architecture.
Alan Alda has also played Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in the play ''QED'', which has only one other character. Although Peter Parnell wrote the play, Alda both produced and inspired it. Alda has also appeared frequently in the films of Woody Allen, and he has been a guest star five times on ER, playing Dr. Gabriel Lawrence. Alda also had a co-starring role as Dr. Robert Gallo in the controversial 1993 AIDS TV movie And The Band Played On.
During MASHs run and continuing through the 1980s, Alda embarked on a successful career as a writer and director, with the ensemble dramedy The Four Seasons being perhaps his most notable hit. 1990's Betsy's Wedding is his last directing credit to date. After M
ASH Alda took on a series of roles that either parodied or directly contradicted his "nice guy" image. His role as a pompous celebrity comedian in Crimes and Misdemeanors was widely seen as a self-parody, although Alda denied this.
Beginning in 2004, Alda was a regular cast member on the NBC program The West Wing, portraying Republican U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful Arnold Vinick, until the show's conclusion in May 2006. He made his premiere in the sixth season's 8th episode, "In The Room," and was added to the opening credits with the thirteenth episode, "King Corn." In August 2006, Alda won an Emmy for his portrayal of Arnold Vinick in the final season of The West Wing.
Throughout his career, he has been nominated for the Emmy Award 31 times and the Tony Award twice, and has won seven People's Choice Awards, six Golden Globe awards, and three Director's Guild of America awards. However, it was not until 2004, after a long acting career, that Alda received his first nomination for an Academy Award. This was the Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role as Senator Ralph Owen Brewster in Martin Scorsese's film The Aviator.
In the spring of 2005, Alda starred as Shelly Levene in the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play.
It has become quite common for Alda in his later roles to have some reference to his early work in M. For instance, both the senator he played in The Aviator and Hawkeye Pierce came from Maine. In a line on ER, his character mentions that he uses a surgical technique he picked up in a "military hospital." The same character also undergoes a mental acuity test where he has to identify pictures of objects. He sees a funnel and identifies it as a martini glass without the base (Hawkeye Pierce was very fond of martinis). Alda's West Wing character has also made at least one reference to Korea when he said, "I could take these people to the DMZ and it still wouldn't take their minds off ethanol and abortion."
In 2005, Alda published his first round of memoirs, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned, published by Random House (ISBN 1-4000-6409-0). Among other stories, he recalls his intestines becoming strangulated while on location in Chile for his PBS show Scientific American Frontiers. He also talks about his mother's battle with schizophrenia. The title comes from an incident in his childhood, when Alda was distraught about his dog dying and his well-meaning father had the animal stuffed. Alda was horrified by the results, and took from this that sometimes we have to accept things as they are, rather than desperately and fruitlessly trying to change them.
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Filmography
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