Alan Alda (born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo on January 28, 1936) is an Oscar-nominated American actor, writer, director and sometimes political activist.

He is most famous for his role as Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H. In the 1970s and 1980s he was viewed as the archetypal "sensitive male," though in recent years he has appeared in roles which counter that image.
Alda was born in New York City. His Italian-American father, Robert Alda (born Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D'Abruzzo), was a successful actor, and his mother Joan Brown was crowned "Miss New York" in a beauty pageant. Their adopted surname "Alda" is a contraction of "Alphonso" and "D'Abruzzo".

When Alan Alda was growing up, his father ran a burlesque theatre. This led to his schizophrenic mother's suspicions of extra-marital affairs, and eventually her attempting to stab his father in the face.

Later on, his parents divorced.

Alan Alda contracted polio when he was seven years old, which kept him bedridden for two years as he received treatments.

Alan Alda's half-brother, Anthony Alda was christened Antonio D'Abruzzo on the 9th of December 1956.

He received his bachelor's degree from Fordham University in 1956. During his junior year, he studied in Europe where he acted in a play in Rome and performed with his father on television in Amsterdam. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Army Reserve and served a six-month tour of duty as a gunnery officer in Korea following the Korean War. A year after graduation, he married Arlene Weiss, with whom he has three daughters: Eve, Elizabeth and Beatrice. Arlene Alda is a well known photographer, author and clarinetist.

Raised as a devout Catholic, he has since left the church but continues to celebrate religious holidays and events. His specific religious beliefs are difficult to define.

He is also an activist for feminist causes, and has been for many years.

Alda began his career in the 1950s as a member of the Compass Players comedy revue.

In the 11 years (1972-1983) he starred in M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, winning five. He wrote (or co-wrote) 20 episodes, and directed 30 episodes. When he won his first Emmy Award for writing, he was so happy that he performed a cartwheel before running up to the stage to accept the award.

He also was the first person to win Emmy Awards for acting, writing, and directing for the same series. Interestingly enough, the late Richard Hooker, who wrote the novel on which M*A*S*H was based, did not like Alan Alda's portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce (Hooker had based Hawkeye on himself, whereas Alda took the character in the womanizing, single direction). Hooker, in fact, did not care for the show in general. Alda also directed the show's 1983 2 1/2 hour finale Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen which still remains the most watched episode of a TV series.

As more and more of the original series writers left the series, Alda gained more control and by the final seasons he had become project and creative consultant. Under his watch, M*A*S*H more openly addressed political issues, often to the point of "preaching" to its audience. Because of this, some fans have criticized Alda taking more creative control of the series, feeling that his imbuing the series with his own political sympathies got in the way of writing good stories - jumping the shark in other words.

As a result, the 11 years of M*A*S*H are generally split into two eras: The Larry Gelbart/Gene Reynolds "comedy" years (1972-1977), and the Alan Alda "dramatic" years (1977-1983).

Alda's prominence in the enormously successful M*A*S*H gave him a platform to speak out on political topics, and he has been a strong and vocal supporter of women's rights. In 1976, the Boston Globe dubbed him "the quintessential Honorary Woman: a feminist icon" for his activism on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. As such, he has been something of a bogeyman for some political and social conservatives.

He has also appeared in at least two TV commercials. Both of these were in the small-computer industry, first for Atari and later, with the rest of the M*A*S*H cast, for IBM's PS/2 product line with MicroChannel architecture.

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. Gabriel Lawrence. Alda also had a co-starring role as Dr. Robert Gallo in the controversial 1993 AIDS TV movie And The Band Played On

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 8th episode, "In The Room", and was added to the opening credits with the thirteenth episode, "King Corn."

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 Director's 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. This was the Best Supporting Actor nomination for his 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.

It has become quite common for Alda in his later roles to have some reference to his early work in M*A*S*H. For instance, both the senator he played in The Aviator and Hawkeye Pierce came from Maine. In a line on ER, his character mentions that he uses a surgical technique he picked up in a "military hospital." The same character also undergoes a mental acuity test where he has to identify pictures of objects. He sees a funnel and identifies it as a martini glass without the base (Hawkeye Pierce was very fond of martinis). Alda's West Wing character has also made at least one reference to Korea when he said, "I could take these people to the DMZ and it still wouldn't take their minds off ethanol and abortion."

In 2005, Alda published his first round of memoirs, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: and Other Things I've Learned, published by Random House (ISBN 1400064090). Among other stories, he recalls his intestines becoming strangulated while on location in Chile for his PBS show Scientific American Frontiers. He also talks about his mother's battle with schizophrenia.

Alda also hosts the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers.