Alda again shreds image in ‘Champ’

A near-death experience changed his outlook.

By JOE NEUMAIER

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

The recent run of nasty or weasely fellows Alan Alda has played in movies (”The Aviator,” which got him his first Oscar nomination), TV (”The West Wing,” as a Republican senator) and stage (”Glengarry Glen Ross,” as a slip-sliding real estate salesman) has gotten the 71-year-old multiple Emmy winner a new rep: the guy who’s discovered his inner anti-mensch.

Yet Alda says he’s never been shy about showing the uglier aspects of his characters, including “Hawkeye” Pierce on TV’s “M*A*S*H.” In “Resurrecting the Champ,” opening Friday, he’s a hard-case newsman who chides a lazy reporter (Josh Hartnett), then sees him gain fame for profiling a former boxer (Samuel L. Jackson) living on the streets of Denver.

“All I’ve ever tried to do is play real people,” Alda says. “Even Hawkeye was flawed. He was a smart-aleck, a skirt-chaser, he drank too much, he thought he knew everything. ... For half an hour at a time, that might be entertaining, but I think it might be annoying to share a tent with him!”

Alda tackled complex guys before “M*A*S*H’s” 1972 TV debut (he was a rapist and felon in the TV movie “Kill Me if You Can”) and during its run (in his feature screenwriting debut, 1979’s “The Seduction of Joe Tynan,” he starred as a morally compromised politician; in his directorial debut, 1981’s “The Four Seasons,” he played a jerky New Yorker). And six years after the show went off the air in 1983, he was a memorable blowhard in Woody Allen’s “Crimes & Misdemeanors.”

It’s just that now, the affable Alda is getting more out of those roles, as he is life.

Nearly died

As recounted in his memoir last year, “Never Have Your Dog Stuffed,” Alda nearly died in 2004 when, after experiencing pain at the top of a mountain in Chile while hosting a PBS science show, a local physician told him he had blockage in his intestine that needed to be extracted. Told he might not survive a trip to a hospital in Santiago, surgery was done by a very competent team at a rural facility. Alda was essentially hours from death.

“Anyone I know who’s almost died has come out of it, at least for a while, looking at things differently,” he says. “If my life had ended that night in Chile, I’d have missed so much. So I wonder about what I’m going to do with whatever time I have ahead of me. I really want to get the most out of it.”

That’s included barreling into work. Wealthy thanks to “M*A*S*H,” he can pick and choose, but he jokes about being happy offers still come.

“I’m very lucky in that things come to me still. I could be sitting there waiting, you know, like, ‘Was that the door?”’ he laughs. “‘Did the phone just ring? Any scripts come addressed to Occupant?”’