Alan Alda
Alan Alda (/ˈɑːldə/; born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo; January 28, 1936) is an American actor, author, screenwriter, podcast host and director. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner and a three-time Tony Award nominee, he is best known for playing Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce in the CBS wartime sitcom M*A*S*H (1972–1983). He also wrote and directed numerous episodes of the series.
Alan Alda
- Actor
- writer
- comedian
- director
- podcaster
- singer
From 1955
3, including Beatrice
- Robert Alda (father)
Antony Alda (half-brother)
United States
1956–1958
After starring in the films Same Time, Next Year (1978), California Suite (1978), and The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), he made his directorial film debut The Four Seasons (1981). Alda was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Owen Brewster in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004). Other notable film roles include in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Tower Heist (2011), Bridge of Spies (2015), and Marriage Story (2019).
Alda won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Senator Arnold Vinick in the NBC series The West Wing. Other Emmy-nominated roles include in And the Band Played On in 1993, ER in 2000, 30 Rock in 2009, and The Blacklist in 2015. He also had recurring roles in The Big C (2011–2013), Horace and Pete (2016), Ray Donovan (2018–2020), and The Good Fight (2018–2019).
Alda is also known for his roles on Broadway acting in Purlie Victorious (1961) and receiving three Tony Award nominations for his performances in The Apple Tree (1967), Jake's Women (1992), and Glengarry Glen Ross (2005). In 2008 he received a Grammy Award for Best Audio Book, Narration & Storytelling Recording nomination for Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. In 2019, Alda received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.[1] He hosts the podcast Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda and previously hosted Science Clear + Vivid.[2]
Early life and education[edit]
Alda was born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo on January 28, 1936, in Manhattan, New York City.[3] He spent his childhood travelling around the United States with his parents, in support of his father's job as a performer.[4] His father, Robert Alda (born Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was an actor and singer; and his mother, Joan Browne, was a homemaker and former beauty-pageant winner.[5] His father was of Italian descent (D'Abruzzo is a toponymic surname) and his mother of Irish descent.[6]
When Alda was seven, he contracted polio. To combat the disease, his parents administered a painful treatment regimen developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny, consisting of applying hot woollen blankets to his limbs and stretching his muscles.[7] Alda attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York.[8] He studied English at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he was a student staff member of its FM radio station, WFUV. During his junior year, he studied in Paris, acted in a play in Rome, and performed with his father on television in Amsterdam.
In 1956, Alda received his Bachelor of Arts degree. A member of the ROTC, he entered the United States Army Reserve and served for six months at Fort Benning.[9] Despite some erroneous reports on military sites that Alda then served in Korea,[10][11][12][13] he has repeatedly said he did not serve there, instead following up active duty of six months at Fort Benning with a time in the reserves in New York City.[14][15] In a 2013 interview, he joked that he was in charge of a mess tent.[16]
Alda's half-brother Antony Alda was born in 1956 and also became an actor.
Career[edit]
1958–1971: Broadway debut and early work[edit]
Alda began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Compass Players, an improvisational comedy revue directed by Paul Sills. He later joined the improvisational group Second City in Chicago. He joined the acting company at the Cleveland Play House during their 1958–1959 season as part of a grant from the Ford Foundation, appearing in productions such as To Dorothy a Son, Heaven Come Wednesday, Monique, and Job.[17] In 1958, he appeared as Carlyle Thompson III on The Phil Silvers Show in the episode titled "Bilko the Art Lover".
Alda portrayed Charlie Cotchipee in the 1961 Ossie Davis play Purlie Victorious on Broadway. In the November 1964 world premiere at the ANTA Playhouse of the stage version of The Owl and The Pussycat, he played Felix the Owl, opposite Pussycat played by actress/singer Diana Sands,[18] an African-American actress; their onstage kiss prompted hate mail.[19] He continued to play Felix the Owl for the 1964–65 Broadway season.[20][21] In 1966, he starred in the musical The Apple Tree on Broadway with Barbara Harris, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for the role. Alda said he became a Mainer in 1957 when he played at the Kennebunkport Playhouse.[22]
Alda was part of the cast, along with David Frost, Henry Morgan and Buck Henry, of the American television version of That Was The Week That Was, which ran as a series from January 10, 1964, to May 1965. He made his Hollywood acting debut as a supporting player in Gone Are the Days!, a film version of the Broadway play Purlie Victorious, which co-starred Ruby Dee and her husband, Ossie Davis. Other film roles followed, such as his portrayal of author, humorist and actor George Plimpton in the film Paper Lion (1968),[8] as well as The Extraordinary Seaman (1969), and the occult-murder-suspense thriller The Mephisto Waltz with actresses Jacqueline Bisset and Barbara Parkins. During this time, Alda frequently appeared as a game show panelist on the 1968 revival of What's My Line?, and on I've Got a Secret during its 1972 syndication revival. Alda wrote several of the stories and poems featured in Marlo Thomas' television show Free to Be... You and Me.
Charitable works[edit]
Alda has done extensive charity work. He helped narrate a 2005 St. Jude Children's Hospital-produced one-hour special TV show Fighting for Life.[43] His wife, Arlene, and he are also close friends of Marlo Thomas, who is very active in fund-raising for the hospital that her father, Danny Thomas founded. The television special featured Ben Bowen as one of six patients being treated for childhood cancer at Saint Jude.[44] Alda and Marlo Thomas had also worked together in the early 1970s on a critically acclaimed children's album entitled Free to Be You and Me, which featured Alda, Thomas, and a number of other well-known character actors. This project remains one of the earliest public signs of his support of women's rights. Alda chaired "Men for the Equal Rights Amendment" and was appointed to the International Women's Year Commission.[45]
Communicating science[edit]
For 14 years, he served as the host of Scientific American Frontiers, a television show that explored cutting-edge advances in science and technology.[35] In 2010, he became a visiting professor at Stony Brook University.[46] In 2009, he was a founder of the university's Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. He continues as a member of its advisory board.[47] He is also on the advisory board of the Future of Life Institute.[48] He serves on the board of the World Science Festival and is a judge for Math-O-Vision.
Alda has an avid interest in cosmology, and participated in BBC coverage of the opening of the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, Geneva, in September 2008.[49]
He was named an Honorary Fellow by the Society for Technical Communication in 2014 for his work with the Center for Communicating Science and the annual Flame Challenge.[50] Alda would like to use his expertise in acting and communication to help scientists communicate more effectively to the public.[51] In 2014 Alda was awarded the American Chemical Society's James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public for his work in science communication.[52] He was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal in 2016 "for his extraordinary application of the skills honed as an actor to communicating science on television and stage, and by teaching scientists innovative techniques that allow them to tell their stories to the public".
In 2011 Alda wrote Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie,[53] a full-length play that focuses on Marie Skłodowska Curie's professional and personal life during the time between the Nobel Prizes won by her for physics and chemistry, from 1903 to 1911.
On 18 February 2021, he received the Kavli Foundation's first-ever Distinguished Kavli Science Communicator award for his pioneering work in communicating the excitement, mystery and marvels of science.[54]
Memoirs[edit]
In 2005, Alda published his first memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned.[24] Among other stories, he recalls his intestines becoming strangulated while on location in La Serena, Chile, for his PBS show Scientific American Frontiers, during which he mildly surprised a young doctor with his understanding of medical procedures, which he had 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.
His second memoir, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself[62] (2008), weaves together advice from public speeches he has given with personal recollections about his life and beliefs.
His third memoir, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating[63] (2017), is a story of his quest to learn how to communicate better, and to teach others to do the same.