Baldwin’s father loved Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, and old films on WOR-TV’s Million-Dollar Movie, so Baldwin did, too. (He does a flawless impression of the station announcer’s mellifluous voice-over: “Barbara Stanwyck gives Gary Cooper a piece of her mind, tomorrow, on The Million-Dollar Movie.”) His father had dropped out of law school to get a teaching degree and was forever supplementing his income with additional duty as a football and riflery coach. Baldwin, too, was interested in law and politics, so he headed to George Washington University in the era of Jimmy Carter, when, as he likes to say, protesters were burning the Shah of Iran in effigy in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, where today they couldn’t light a match without being shot by a sniper. Hilary Rosen, now a Democratic political operative, lived across the corridor from Baldwin in Thurston Hall. She also dated Baldwin and remains friendly with him today. “He was really passionate about politics,” Rosen says. “He was funny—and I won’t say he was lighthearted, because he was always ambitious; he always wanted to have an impact and be in the thick of things.”

In those post-Watergate years, Baldwin served an internship with Jerry Ambro, a liberal Democratic congressman from Long Island. Mostly he opened mail, but at one point, someone on Ambro’s staff gave him a more serious assignment: to find the most well-adjusted Vietnam veteran in the congressman’s district, so that he could be recognized by a national organization that honored returning vets. Baldwin did a couple of weeks’ worth of research and then had a rare personal meeting with the congressman to put forward his selection: Ron Kovic, the fiery anti-war activist who would later be portrayed by Tom Cruise in the movie Born on the Fourth of July.

“And there’s a long pause,” Baldwin recalls, in full ’Guyland accent, “and Ambro goes, ‘Aah you out of yoar-ah mind?!!’ And he shuts down my whole program.”

“Handsome Harry”

As a college junior, Baldwin lost an election for student-association president. He learned, he now says, “when you draw the posters, draw more neatly.” As his political passion waned, his dramatic passion waxed: all those years of hamming it up at home began to exert a pull. Manhattan may have been a place that cost money, but as a teenager Baldwin had made it into town often enough to become acquainted with the theater. He vividly recalls a performance from his first Broadway show—John Cullum singing in the musical Shenandoah: “I’ll never forget watching a man onstage do that, a man move like that, and then the whole audience—I looked to the right of me, I looked to the left of me, the light in people’s faces … ” He was accepted into the drama program at New York University, and, on the long car ride from Washington to New York, Baldwin asked his father, who “wasn’t a chatty guy,” if the decision to transfer had been the right one. The answer was a question: “Do you have the things it takes to be a good actor?,” which the elder Baldwin went on to define as, above all, intelligence, ultimately declaring that he thought his son did indeed have what it took.

Baldwin arrived in the bright lights and big city of late-70s Manhattan (he was briefly a busboy at Studio 54) and almost before he knew it he was noticed by a woman in a restaurant—he was her waiter—who had a friend who was a producer. An introduction led to a job on the network soap opera The Doctors, and he dropped out of school. A producer for the show also rebranded him as “Alec.” On The Doctors, Baldwin played Billy Aldrich, an adenoidal ne’er-do-well with smoldering looks who once blackmailed a lover with the deathless line “I’m going to blow your entire future sky-high!” Scenery-chewing was a Baldwin specialty, but he began to pick up the craft. “Like all young actors,” he recalls, “I’m trying too hard back then—trying to play the whole novel in one scene.” A subsequent stint on the nighttime soap Knots Landing led to good parts in movies such as Beetlejuice, Married to the Mob, and Working Girl. In 1990, he won his breakout role as Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, starring opposite Sean Connery. Baldwin seemed all set for a run of what his friend Robert Osborne calls “shallow, ‘Handsome Harry’ leading roles.” But, in what would become a pattern, he got into a bitter argument with Paramount over the terms for the Jack Ryan sequels. Baldwin ultimately walked away from the series to keep a commitment to play Stanley Kowalski in the 1992 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Frank Rich, then the New York Times drama critic, would call Baldwin’s performance the only one he’d ever seen that didn’t make him pine for Brando. Meanwhile, the lucrative Jack Ryan franchise became Harrison Ford’s.