Alec Baldwin

Alexander Rae Baldwin III was born on April 3, 1958, in Amityville, New York, and raised in the Nassau Shores neighborhood of Massapequa, New York. The eldest son of Carol Newcomb Baldwin and Alexander Rae Baldwin Jr., a high school history and social studies teacher and football coach from Brooklyn, he grew up alongside three younger brothers — Daniel, William, and Stephen — all of whom became actors, as well as two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane. Baldwin and his siblings were raised as Catholics and are of Irish, French, and English ancestry. His maternal grandfather, Daniel Roy Martineau, played football at Syracuse University and later professionally in the National Football League for the Buffalo All-Americans and the Rochester Jeffersons. Through his father's line, Baldwin descends from Mayflower passenger John Howland, making him the thirteenth generation of his family born in North America.

Baldwin attended Alfred G. Berner High School in Massapequa, where he played football under Coach Bob Reifsnyder. He enrolled at George Washington University from 1976 to 1979, during which time he ran unsuccessfully for student body president and received a personal letter from former president Richard Nixon in response to the loss. He subsequently transferred to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute under Geoffrey Horne and Mira Rostova, and was later accepted as a member of the Actors Studio. During his time in New York City, he worked as a busboy at Studio 54. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at NYU in 1994.

Baldwin's professional acting career began on television, with his first role as Billy Aldrich on the NBC daytime soap opera The Doctors from 1980 to 1982. He went on to appear in the short-lived series Cutter to Houston in 1983, made his television movie debut in The Sheriff and the Astronaut in 1984, and joined the cast of Knots Landing from 1984 to 1985. In 1986, he starred in the four-hour television miniseries Dress Gray.

His Broadway career spans 1986 to 2018. Baldwin made his Broadway debut in 1986 in a revival of Joe Orton's Loot, appearing alongside Zoë Wanamaker, Željko Ivanek, Joseph Maher, and Charles Keating in a production that closed after three months. That debut earned him a Theatre World Award in 1986. His subsequent Broadway credits include Caryl Churchill's Serious Money with Kate Nelligan, a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in which he played Stanley Kowalski, Short Talks on the Universe, On the Twentieth Century, and Orphans. His portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play. Baldwin also received an Emmy nomination for the 1995 television adaptation of that production, in which he and Jessica Lange reprised their roles alongside John Goodman and Diane Lane.

Baldwin's film career began with a minor role in the 1987 comedy-mystery Forever, Lulu. In 1988, he appeared in five major films, including Tim Burton's Beetlejuice opposite Michael Keaton and Geena Davis, Mike Nichols' Working Girl, Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob, Oliver Stone's Talk Radio opposite Eric Bogosian, and the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern. He gained wider recognition as a leading man playing Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October in 1990, the same year he starred in Miami Blues alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh and Fred Ward. He met his future wife Kim Basinger while filming The Marrying Man in 1991. The following year, he played a ferocious sales executive in the film adaptation of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and starred opposite Meg Ryan in Prelude to a Kiss.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Baldwin appeared in a wide range of films. He reunited with Basinger in The Getaway in 1994 and played the title character in The Shadow that same year. He starred in several thrillers in 1996 and 1997, including The Edge, The Juror, and Ghosts of Mississippi. In 1998, he played the title role in Macbeth at The Public Theater alongside Angela Bassett and Liev Schreiber in a production directed by George C. Wolfe, and wrote an episode of Law and Order entitled Tabloid. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role as a casino manager in The Cooler in 2003 and a second nomination for It's Complicated in 2010. Additional film credits include The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Along Came Polly (2004), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Blue Jasmine (2013), and two entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018). From 2017 to 2021, he voiced the titular character in The Boss Baby film franchise. In 2024, he starred in the Western film Rust, a production that had drawn significant media attention following a 2021 on-set shooting incident in which cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed when Baldwin accidentally discharged a live round from a revolver he was using as a prop.

On television, Baldwin served as narrator for the American dubbed versions of seasons five and six of Thomas and Friends from 1999 to 2003, and played Mr. Conductor in the 2000 film Thomas and the Magic Railroad. From 2006 to 2013, he starred alongside Tina Fey on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock as Jack Donaghy, a role for which he won two Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Actor in a comedy series. Beginning in 1990, he hosted Saturday Night Live a record seventeen times, earning particular acclaim for his recurring portrayal of Donald Trump, which won him his third Primetime Emmy Award in 2017 and generated additional nominations in 2018 and 2021. He hosted the Academy Awards in 2010 and served as host of the game show Match Game from 2016 to 2021. Baldwin, his wife Hilaria, and their seven children are the subjects of the TLC reality series The Baldwins. His total accolades include three Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, eight Screen Actors Guild Awards, and nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Tony Award. He also served as a columnist for The Huffington Post.