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| Birth Name(s) : Alan Alda |
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Full Alan Alda Biography
Alda was born Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in the Bronx. His father, Robert Alda (1914-1986) aka Alphonso Giovanni Giuseppe Roberto D'Abruzzo, was an actor and singer, and his mother, Joan Brown, was crowned Miss New York in a beauty pageant. Alda is of Italian and Irish descent. His adopted surname "Alda" is a combination of ALfonso and D'Abruzzo. Alda has a half-brother, Antony Alda.
Alda contracted polio, aged 7, during an epidemic. His parents administered a painful treatment, developed by Sister Elizabeth Kenny, where hot woolen blankets were applied to the limbs and the muscles were stretched by massage. This treatment, though brutal, allowed Alda to recover much movement.
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, Gabriel Lawrence. During the later episodes, it was revealed that Dr. Lawrence was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. Alda also had a co-starring role as Dr. Robert Gallo in the 1993 TV movie And the Band Played On.
He denies that in 1995 he briefly considered running for the United States Senate in New Jersey. About this time, he starred as the President in Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon. In 1996, Alda played Henry Ford in Camping With Henry and Tom, based on the book by Mark St. Germain. 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.
Alda has done extensive charity work. He helped narrate a 2005 St. Jude's Children's Hospital produced one-hour special TV show Fighting for Life. He is friends with Marlo Thomas, who is active in fund raising for the hospital her father founded. The special featured Ben Bowen as one of six patients being treated for childhood cancer at Saint Jude.
Alda also wrote several of the stories and poems that appeared in Marlo Thomas's Free to Be... You and Me television show.
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 Directors 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.
In 2005, Alda published his first round of memoirs, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned. 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.
His second memoir, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, weaves together advice from public speeches he has given with personal recollections about his life and beliefs.
In the above-mentioned memoir, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, Alan Alda briefly describes how one day he realized he had become an atheist:
For a while in my teens, I was sure I had it. It was about getting to heaven. If heaven existed and lasted forever, then a mere lifetime spent scrupulously following orders was a small investment for an infinite payoff. One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back. Not that I lost the urge to pray. Occasionally, even after I stopped believing, I might send off a quick memo to the Master of the Universe, usually on a matter needing urgent attention, like Oh, God, don’t let us crash. These were automatic expulsions of words, brief SOS messages from the base of my brain. They were similar to the short prayers that were admired by the church in my Catholic boyhood, which they called “ejaculations.” I always liked the idea that you could shorten your time in purgatory with each ejaculation; what boy wouldn’t find that a comforting idea? But my effort to keep the plane in the air by talking to God didn’t mean I suddenly was overcome with belief, only that I was scared. Whether I’d wake up in heaven someday or not, whatever meaning I found would have to occur first on this end of eternity. |
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