Santiago, Oct 21: Actor Alan Alda, who starred in the hit U.S. television comedy "M*A*S*H," was recovering on Monday from emergency surgery in northern Chile after falling ill while filming a TV documentary. Alda, 67, host of the PBS series "Scientific American Frontiers" for the past seven years, had surgery early on Sunday for an intestinal obstruction and was recuperating at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in La Serena, 290 miles north of the capital, Santiago.
Hospital Director Julio Rojas told Chile's Cooperativa radio station that Alda had asked for no visitors and was expecting his wife to arrive later on Monday.
Alda was working on an astronomy documentary for "Scientific American Frontiers," part of which was being filmed on location at a huge telescope in the Chilean Andes.
A stage, film and television performer in a career dating back to the 1950s, Alda is best known for his Emmy Award-winning role as Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, the insubordinate Army doctor on "M*A*S*H," which ran on CBS for 11 years in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The son of actor Robert Alda, the "M*A*S*H" star went on to appear in numerous TV and film projects, including three Woody Allen movies -- "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and "Everyone Says I Love You."
Other film credits include Robert Mulligan's 1978 adaptation of the romantic comedy "Same Time, Next Year," opposite Ellen Burstyn, and the 1981 ensemble comedy-drama "The Four Seasons," which he directed, wrote and co-starred in with Carol Burnett.
More recently, he appeared in five episodes of NBC's hit medical drama "ER" as a prominent physician in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, and returned to Broadway last year as a physicist in the one-man play "QED." Bureau Report