Alan Alda

Alan Alda
Image:Alan Alda Emmys 1994.jpg 1994 Emmy Awards, Photo by Alan Light
Birth name	Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
Born	January 28 1936 (age 73) New York City, New York, USA
Spouse(s)	Arlene Alda (1957-present)
Awards Emmy Awards Actor of the Year - Series 1974 M*A*S*H Outstanding Lead Actor - Comedy Series 1982 M*A*S*H Outstanding Supporting Actor - Drama Series 2006 The West Wing Outstanding Directing - Comedy Series 1977 M*A*S*H Outstanding Writing - Comedy Series 1979 M*A*S*H

Alan Alda (b. January 28, 1936) is an Emmy Award-winning American actor, author, director and political activist.

He is perhaps most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. During the 1970s and 1980s he was viewed as the archetypal sympathetic male, though in recent years he has appeared in roles which counter that image.

Biography

Family and early life

Alda was born Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in New York City. His Italian-American father, Robert Alda (1914-1986) aka Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo, was an actor, and his mother Joan Brown was crowned Miss New York in a beauty pageant. Their adopted surname "Alda" is a combination of ALfonso and D'Abruzzo. Alda's half-brother, Anthony Alda, was christened Antonio D'Abruzzo on 9 December 1956.

Alda contracted polio when seven years old, which kept him bedridden for two years as he received treatment.

He attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY and later 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, and a grandson, Scott. Arlene Alda is an accomplished photographer, author, and musician.

Raised in a devoutly Catholic family, he continues to attend weekly Mass and celebrate religious holidays and events.^{[citation needed]}

Alda was a member of the Compass Players in the late 1950s. He has also been an activist for feminism for many years.

Career

Alda began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Compass Players comedy revue.

In the 11 years he starred in M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, winning five. He took part in writing 20 episodes, and directed 30. 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. 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, a Republican, had based Hawkeye on himself, whereas Alda took the character in a more left-wing direction). Alda also directed the show's 1983 2½ hour series finale "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" which remains the single most watched episode of a TV series. Alda is in fact the only series regular to appear in each and every one of 251 episodes.

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

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 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*A*S*H 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. Kerry Weaver's mentor, Dr. Gabriel Lawrence. During the later episodes, it was revealed that Dr. Lawrence was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's or dementia. Alda also had a co-starring role as Dr. Robert Gallo in the controversial 1993 TV movie And The Band Played On.

During M*A*S*H's 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. 1990s Betsy's Wedding is his last directing credit to date. After M*A*S*H 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.

In 1995 he briefly considered running for the United States Senate in New Jersey.

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 eighth 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 for his supporting 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*A*S*H. In a line on ER, his character mentions that he uses a surgical technique that is "an old army trick"." 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.^[1] Among other stories, he recalls his intestines becoming strangulated while on location in Chile for his PBS show Scientific American Frontiers, during which he mildly surprised a young doctor with his understanding of medical procedures, which he learned from M*A*S*H. 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.

Work

References

Wikipedia information about Alan Alda This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alan Alda". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.