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Alan Alda (born January 28, 1936 as Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo) is an American actor, writer, director and sometimes political activist.

He is most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. In the 1970s and 80s he was viewed as the archetypal "sensitive male", though in recent years he has appeared in roles which counter that image.

Contents 1 Family and early life 2 Acting career, fame, and M*A*S*H 3 After M*A*S*H 4 Filmography 5 External links

Family and early life

Alda was born in Chicago, Il. 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. The adopted surname "Alda" is a contraction of "ALphonso" and "D'Abruzzo".

Alan 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 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.

Raised as a devout Catholic, he has since left the church but continues to 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.

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 eleven years he starred in M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards winning five. He wrote (or co-wrote) twenty episodes, and directed thirty 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, the late Richard Hooker, who wrote the novel on which M*A*S*H was based, did not like Alan Alda's portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce (Hooker had based Hawkeye on himself), but then again, Hooker didn't care for the show in general.

The amount of creative control he assumed during the later seasons of M*A*S*H has been a subject of debate among fans of the series. Some fans feel that Alda's imbuing the series with his own political beliefs as the original series writers left took the show to the heights of brilliance, but other fans feel that as Alda gained control M*A*S*H became too preachy and ultimately turned into "The Alan Alda Show" or "The gospel according to Alan Alda". Such fans feel that Alda taking more creative control over the series during the later seasons was a sign that M*A*S*H had jumped the shark.

After M*A*S*H

Alda's prominence in the enormously successful M*A*S*H gave him a platform to speak out on political topics, and he has been a strong and vocal supporter of equal rights for women. As such, he has been something of a boogeyman for some political social conservatives who disagree with his views.

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*A*S*H cast, for IBM's PS/2 product line with MicroChannel architecture.

Alan Alda has also created the character of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in the play QED. The play is almost a one-man production, with 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 is a regular cast member on the NBC program The West Wing, portraying Republican senator and presidential hopeful, Arnold Vinick. He made his premiere in the sixth season's tenth episode, "In The Room", and was added to the opening credits with the thirteenth episode, "King Corn".

Throughout his career, he has been nominated for the Emmy Award 29 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. Alda was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Senator Ralph Owen Brewster in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. This was his first Oscar nomination in a long and storied acting career. 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 normal for Alda in his later roles to have some reference to his early work in M*A*S*H. 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 1400064090). 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.

Filmography

• Gone Are the Days! (1963)
• Paper Lion (1968)
• The Extraordinary Seaman (1969)
• Jenny (1970)
• The Moonshine War (1970)
• The Mephisto Waltz (1971)
• To Kill a Clown (1972)
• The Glass House (1972)
• Kill Me If You Can(TV) (1977)
• Same Time, Next Year (1978)
• California Suite (1978)
• The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) (also writer)
• The Four Seasons (movie) (1981) (also director and writer)
• Sweet Liberty (1986) (also director and writer)
• A New Life (1988) (also director and writer)
• Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
• Betsy's Wedding (1990) (also director and writer)
• Whispers in the Dark (1992)
• Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
• Canadian Bacon (1995)
• Flirting with Disaster (1996)
• Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
• Murder at 1600 (1997)
• Mad City (1997)
• The Object of My Affection (1998)
• Keepers of the Frame (1999) (documentary)
• What Women Want (2000)
• The Aviator (2004)

External links

• Bio on Scientific American Frontiers
• Comprehensive bio
• Military Service
• GeoCities fan site page
• Alan Alda at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Alda on NPR's Fresh Air (September 21, 2005)
• Never Have Your Dog Stuffed web site

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