Comprehensive information and links about Alan Alda

Alan Alda Alan Alda is an American actor, writer, director and sometimes political activist.

He is most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series . 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. The adopted surname "Alda" is a contraction of "bruzzo".

When Alan Alda was growing up, his father divorced.

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

Alan Alda's half-brother, Anthony Alda was christened on the 9th of December 1956.

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. Arlene Alda is a well known photographer, author and clarinettist.

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.

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

In the eleven years (72-83) he starred in , 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 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.

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

Alan Alda has also created the character of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in the play , 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 , portraying Republican U.S. 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. 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 .

In the spring of 2005, Alda starred as Shelly Levene in the Tony Award-winning Broadway revival of David Mamet's 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 , 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 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, , published by Random House (ISBN 1400064090). Among other stories, he recalls his intestines becoming strangulated while on location in Chile for his PBS show