Alan Alda

Alan Alda has worked on stage and screen across seven decades, and for eleven years of that he was Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H, a part he also wrote and directed episodes around. That combination matters. Hawkeye was funny, then angry, then exhausted, and the show tracked the change because the man playing him was writing and directing episodes of it. It is one of the few long-running television performances that gets harder rather than easier to watch.

His awards read like two separate careers, which is roughly what they are: six Primetime Emmy Awards and six Golden Globes, including Emmy wins as a lead actor in comedy and as a supporting actor in drama, plus nominations for an Academy Award, a Grammy, three Tony Awards and two BAFTAs. He also wrote and directed features of his own, among them The Four Seasons, Sweet Liberty and Betsy's Wedding.

The second act is the more surprising one. Once he was no longer required to be the decent man, he turned out to be superb at playing men who have talked themselves into something. Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanors is a monstrously self-satisfied television producer. Senator Brewster in The Aviator and Arthur Shaw in Tower Heist are variations on the same smiling bad faith. Then the late run softened again without going slack: the lawyer in Bridge of Spies, Arnold Vinick on The West Wing, and Bert Spitz in Marriage Story, a divorce attorney who tells his jokes badly and is kinder than his profession requires. Very few actors get to be that likeable and then spend decades complicating it.