Alec Baldwin has hosted Saturday Night Live more than anyone else
Seventeen times since 1990, Alec Baldwin has stepped onto the Saturday Night Live stage as host, a record. The Long Island teacher's son once bussed tables at Studio 54, got a consoling letter from Richard Nixon after losing a student election, and later turned a smug network boss called Jack Donaghy into television gold.
Born in Amityville, New York, on April 3, 1958, Baldwin grew up in nearby Massapequa, the eldest son of a history teacher and football coach. His three younger brothers, Daniel, William and Stephen, all went into acting too. At George Washington University he ran for student body president in 1979 and lost; Nixon wrote urging him to treat defeat as a lesson. He moved on to NYU's Tisch School, trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and joined the Actors Studio, though he only finished his degree in 1994.
His start was a daytime soap, The Doctors, from 1980. The breakout year was 1988, when he appeared in five major films, among them Tim Burton's Beetlejuice and Mike Nichols's Working Girl. Two years later he starred as Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, sharing the screen with Sean Connery, which took $122 million in North America. In Glengarry Glen Ross he delivered the 'Coffee's for closers' monologue, written into the film version of David Mamet's play.
Later he leaned into character parts. A casino heavy in The Cooler earned him an Oscar nomination, and Roger Ebert called it among his best work. He worked twice for Martin Scorsese, in The Aviator and The Departed, and played Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire, drawing a Tony nomination. Children know his voice from The Boss Baby films and from narrating Thomas and Friends.
The comic peak came with 30 Rock on NBC from 2006 to 2013, opposite Tina Fey, which brought Emmys, Golden Globes and a stack of Screen Actors Guild awards. His Donald Trump impression on SNL won him a third Primetime Emmy in 2017. The Western Rust carries a darker history: in 2021 a revolver he was handling as a prop fired a live round, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
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