Bio
Alec Baldwin is an American actor who first gained recognition through television for his work in the soap opera Knots Landing, which aired on CBS from 1984 to 1986.
He has since played both leading and supporting roles in films such as Beetlejuice (1988), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006). His performance in the 2003 film The Cooler garnered him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination.
He currently stars as Jack Donaghy on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, but will leave the show in 2012.
Alec grew up in Massapequa, Long Island where his father was a high school teacher for twenty-eight years and his mother raised six children, including his sisters, Beth and Jane.
Alec is the eldest of his brothers, Daniel, William, and Stephen Baldwin, all of whom are actors in film and television.
Alec attended George Washington University and planned to attend law school, when he auditioned for the New York University Undergraduate Drama Program on a dare. He was accepted, and in 1979 began what would become his professional training.
In 1980, he was cast in the daytime TV series The Doctors on NBC and, subsequently, has worked in nearly every venue as a professional actor ever since.
Whether in regional theatre or Saturday Night Live, blockbuster movies or Broadway, literary festivals or television mini-series, Alec has always attempted to balance his love of communicating with an audience with the demands of a motion picture career.
On Broadway, Baldwin appeared in The Roundabout Theatre Company's 2004 revival of Hecht and MacArthur's The Twentieth Century, directed by Walter Bobbie, co-starring Anne Heche.
He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the 1992 revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, was nominated for an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award for the television movie of that same production, won an Obie Award for the 1991 off-Broadway production of Craig Lucas' Prelude to a Kiss and a Theatre World Award in 1986 for his turn in Joe Orton's Loot on Broadway.
He has also performed on Broadway in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money.
Other stage work includes David Mamet's Life in the Theatre, (directed by the late AJ Antoon), the Williamstown Theatre Festival and at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York, where he performed in Ira Lewis's Gross Points.
Alec has starred in several films, including The Hunt for Red October, Miami Blues, Prelude to a Kiss, Malice, The Shadow, Glengarry Glen Ross, Heaven's Prisoners, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Edge, Pearl Harbor and Cat in the Hat, among others.
In 2004, Baldwin received a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his role in Wayne Kramer's The Cooler. That year, Baldwin was awarded the National Board of Review Best Supporting Actor honour for The Cooler.
He also appeared in The Last Shot with Mathew Broderick and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. In 2005 he appeared in Cameron Crowe’s film Elizabethtown and in Jim Carrey’s comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, also starring Tea Leoni and directed by Dean Parisot.
His production company, El Dorado Pictures, has co-produced The Confession (winner of the 2000 Writers Guild Award for best adapted screenplay by David Black) for Cinemax Television, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial for Turner Network Television, State and Main, a motion picture comedy written and directed by David Mamet and TNT Productions Second Nature co-starring Powers Boothe.
Alec is an out-spoken supporter of various causes related to public policy, including environmentalism, the government's support of the arts, campaign finance reform, animal rights and gun control.
He serves on the board of directors of The Bay Street Theatre (Sag Harbor, Long Island), The New York University/Brennan Center for Justice Program Advisory Board, People For The American Way and the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund, dedicated in honour of his mother.
He is a vigorous supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). He is a dedicated supporter of the East Hampton Daycare Center.
Baldwin is a graduate of New York University (BFA, Tisch School of the Arts), 1994.
Alec has a daughter, Ireland Eliesse.