Beloved American actor and director Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye Pierce in the iconic long-running war TV series M*A*S*H, has revealed he has Parkinson's disease.
The six-time Emmy Award winner said he was diagnosed three-and-a-half years ago. Alda, 82, told CBS News: "I've had a full life since then. I've acted, I've given talks, I help at the Alda Centre for Communicating Science at Stony Brook [University in New York].
"I started this new podcast. And I noticed that — I had been on television a lot in the last couple of weeks talking about the new podcast — and I could see my thumb twitch in some shots and I thought, it's probably only a matter of time before somebody does a story about this from a sad point of view, but that's not where I am."
Alda said he was not angry over the diagnosis, and is instead viewing it as a challenge. He told CBS he thought that revealing his diagnosis might be helpful to others with Parkinson's disease that there are things they can still do, encouraging them to "take action".
