Alan Alda (born January 28, 1936 as Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo) is an 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 and for being the host of the TV show Scientific American Frontiers.
Alan Alda: 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 pagent. 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 for a sixth-month tour of duty as a gunnery officer in Korea. A year after graduation, he married Arlene Weiss, with whom he would have three daughters: Eve, Elizabeth and Beatrice.
Alan Alda: 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 of M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards for M*A*S*H, 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.
Alan Alda: 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 bogeyman 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 Pulitzer Prize-winning 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".
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 bursting while on location in Chile for his PBS show Scientific American Frontiers and being treated at a hospital very much like the one in M*A*S*H.
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