Alan Alda

Description

Alan Alda (b. January 28, 1936) is a five-time Emmy Award-winning, six-time Golden Globe-winning, Academy Award-nominated American actor. He is perhaps most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. During the 1970s and 1980s he was viewed as the archetypal sympathetic male, though in recent years he has appeared in roles which counter that image.<p>Alda was born Alfonso Joseph D'Abruzzo in New York City. His Italian-American father, Robert Alda (1914-1986) aka Alfonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo, was an actor, and his mother Joan Brown was crowned Miss New York in a beauty pageant. Their adopted surname "Alda" is a combination of ALfonso and D'Abruzzo. Alda's half-brother, Antony Alda, was christened Antonio D'Abruzzo on 9 December 1956.<p>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...