Alexander Rae Baldwin III (born April 3, 1958) is an American actor, comedian, and producer. In his early career, Baldwin played both leading and supporting roles in a variety of films such as Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988), Mike Nichols' Working Girl (1988), Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob (1988), and Oliver Stone's Talk Radio (1988). He gained attention for his performances in The Hunt for Red October (1990) as Jack Ryan and in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Since then he has worked with directors such as Woody Allen in Alice (1990), To Rome with Love (2012) and Blue Jasmine (2013), and Martin Scorsese in The Aviator (2004) and The Departed (2006). His performance in the drama The Cooler (2003) garnered him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He has done voice work for The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008), Rise of the Guardians (2012), and The Boss Baby film franchise (2017–2022).
From 2006 to 2013, Baldwin received critical acclaim starring alongside Tina Fey as Jack Donaghy on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, winning two Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards for his work on the series, making him the male performer with the most SAG Awards in history. On stage, he portrayed Stanley Kowalski in the 1992 Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire and the title character in a 1998 Off-Broadway production of Macbeth, the former earning him a Tony Award nomination. Baldwin co-starred in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) and Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), the fifth and sixth installments of the Mission: Impossible series. He is also a columnist for The Huffington Post. He also was the host of Match Game from 2016 until 2021.
Baldwin has received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Donald Trump on the long-running sketch series Saturday Night Live, both during the latter part of the 2016 presidential election campaign and following the inauguration, a role that won him his third Primetime Emmy in 2017. He was nominated again in 2018 and 2021.
In 2021, while on the Rust film set, Baldwin discharged a revolver used as a prop, which killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. On January 31, 2023, Baldwin was criminally charged by the Santa Fe County, New Mexico, district attorney's office with two counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Early life :
Alexander Rae Baldwin III was born on April 3, 1958, in Amityville, New York, and raised in the Nassau Shores neighborhood of nearby Massapequa, the eldest son of Carol Newcomb (née Martineau; December 15, 1929 – May 26, 2022) from Syracuse and Alexander Rae Baldwin Jr. (October 26, 1927 – April 15, 1983), a high school history/social studies teacher and football coach from Brooklyn. He has three younger brothers, Daniel (born 1960), William (born 1963), and Stephen (born 1966), who also became actors. He also has two sisters, Elizabeth "Beth" Baldwin Keuchler (born 1955) and Jane Ann Baldwin Sasso (born 1965).
Alec and his siblings were raised as Roman Catholics. They are of Irish, French, and English ancestry. Through his father, Baldwin is descended from Mayflower passenger John Howland, and through this line, is the 13th generation of his family born in North America and the 14th generation to live in North America.
Baldwin attended Alfred G. Berner High School in Massapequa and played football there under Coach Bob Reifsnyder. In New York City, Baldwin worked as a busboy at the famed discotheque, Studio 54. From 1976 to 1979, he attended George Washington University. In 1979, he lost the election for student body president and received a personal letter from former U.S. president Richard Nixon (with whom he had a common friend) encouraging him to use the loss as a learning experience.
Afterward, he transferred to the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University (NYU) where he studied with, among others, Geoffrey Horne and Mira Rostova at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Later, he was accepted as a member of the Actors Studio. In 1994, he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at NYU.
