Alan Alda is a television and film star best known for his work in the long-running CBS television series M*A*S*H. He has been well honored for that role, having won 28 Emmy nominations, two Writers Guild Awards, three Directors Guild Awards, six Golden Globes from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and seven People’s Choice Awards. Alda is the only person to have been honored by the Television Academy as top performer, writer, and director.

The son of actor Robert Alda, Alan traveled with his father on the vaudeville circuit and began performing in summer stock theater as a teenager. During his junior year at Fordham University, he studied in Europe, where he performed on the stage in Rome and on television in Amsterdam with his father. After college he acted at the Cleveland Playhouse on a Ford Foundation grant. Upon returning to New York, Alda worked on and off Broadway, and on television. He later acquired improvisational training with Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and with Compass in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and that background in political and social satire led to his work as a regular on television’s That Was the Week That Was.

Alda found fame on M*A*S*H, where his depiction of sensitive surgeon Hawkeye Pierce won him five Emmy Awards. Set in the Korean War of the 1950s, and broadcast in part during the Vietnam War in the 1970s, M*A*S*H won acclaim for its broad and irreverent humor, its ability to effectively combine drama with comedy, and its overall liberal humanist stance. In adapting the show from the 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name, producer and director Gene Reynolds and writer Larry Gelbart used distinctive telefilm aesthetics and a complex narrative structure that set the show apart from the proscenium-style series that dominated television in the 1960s. The show’s influence was broad, traceable perhaps most directly in the large number of 1980s multicharacter dramas and “dramedies” (such as Hill Street Blues and St. Else- where) whose narratives also centered around a tightly knit workplace group who became like family to one another.

Alda, who also wrote and directed many episodes of the show, has become indelibly associated with M*A*S*H, which continues to be watched as one of the most successful comedies in syndication. His “sensitive male” persona, derived in large part from his characterization on M*A*S*H, continues to be sustained by public awareness of his efforts on behalf of women’s rights and other causes. An ardent feminist, Alda campaigned extensively for ten years for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and, in 1976, he was appointed by President Ford to serve on the National Commission for the Observance of International Women’s Year. Alda’s status as a feminist led a writer in the Boston Globe to dub him “the quintessential Honorary Woman: a feminist icon.”

Despite such associations, one of Alda’s most acclaimed performances was his portrayal of a conniving producer in the 1989 Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Alda won the D.W. Griffith Award and the New York Film Critics Award, and he was nomi- nated for a British Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his work in the film.

Following this success, Alda added other dimensions to his “character type.” For example, he continued his exploration of a “darker side” with his portrayal of a driven corporate executive in the HBO original production White Mile (1994). In another notable role, Alda returned to network television in 1999 as a guest star in several episodes of NBC’s medical drama E.R.; once again, he played a doctor, but, in contrast to M*A*S*H’s brash, youthful Hawkeye Pierce, E.R.’s Dr. Gabriel Lawrence was an aging figure in tragic de- cline, losing his mind and his ability to practice medicine due to Alzheimer’s disease. The more familiar, inquisitive, humorous Alda is currently host of the series Scientific American Frontiers on PBS.