Who

A gangly wiseguy with a mushy, liberal center—a joker with a heart of gold—Alda is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H.

Backstory

The son of an actor and a mentally ill beauty pageant winner, Alda grew up traveling with the burlesque and vaudeville troupe in which his father performed. It was his dad who adopted the stage name "Alda," which Alan—who was born Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo—would also adopt for his own career. After overcoming a childhood bout with polio, Alda went into the Army Reserve, serving as a gunnery officer during the Korean War, and turned to acting in the '50s. He landed roles in several films and plays before signing on for the role of Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H, where he remained for 11 seasons. Since the show ended in 1983, Alda has had a slow but steady acting career, appearing in movies like Sweet Liberty, Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Murder at 1600.

Of note

Alda can still be seen on M*A*S*H reruns, which air constantly, forever preserving him as a lanky 20-something. In recent years, he's acted opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 2004's The Aviator, and had bit parts on shows like The West Wing and ER. He's also acted on Broadway, starring in the revival of Glengarry Glen Ross with Liev Schreiber in 2004. In 2005, Alda ended his 15-year stint hosting Scientific American Frontiers, the educational science and technology show on PBS. (Like M*A*S*H, though, it lives on in reruns.) The show featured Alda reporting from remote locations around the world, sometimes with less-than-glamorous results. On a 2003 shoot in Chile, Alda had a blockage in his intestines, and had to undergo emergency surgery.

In print

In 2005, Alda published a memoir about his bizarre childhood, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. The title comes from a childhood incident in which Alda's dad—in an attempt to cheer his son up—took the recently deceased family dog, Rhapsody, to a taxidermist. In 2007, he followed up with Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.

Personal

He married photographer and clarinetist Arlene Weiss in 1957. They have three adult daughters, Eve, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. The Aldas own a pair of adjoining apartments in the Upper West Side's Millenium Tower—2,400 square feet in all—which they bought for $4.9 million in 2000. Neighbors in the building include Regis Philbin, Liam Neeson, and Howard Stern.