There are far worse labels than "nice guy"—you could probably find a few over your morning coffee in today’s paper. So when the media described Alan Alda as "nice", "good", and even "perfect", it was meant as praise.

Still, Alda later said he didn’t fully recognize the version of himself being described, noting that the public image created by the media didn’t quite match the real man behind it. While they are good compliments, they weren’t clear-cut. 

"The more I read about this guy Alan Alda, the more he's out there somewhere. He's not me," Alda said in an interview with the New York Daily News. "We just have the same name and face. It's an imaginary character. I am not this mythical perfect guy."

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Additionally, Alda felt the perceptions of him were so superficial they lacked any real staying power.

"I've been sort of tagged with this nice-guy stuff. I guess it will stick for a while and then people will find out I have big ears and they'll talk about that," Alda said. "I can't figure out where this came from, because I play people who are flawed, and that's all I write about, people who aren't perfect."

Alda saw himself as so imperfect that he often embraced the mindset of an "outsider," a vantage point that fueled his work as a writer and creator. Yet despite that self-perception, he was consistently described—by both the media and his longtime M*A*S*H castmates—as genuinely likable. 

"I'm liberated from worrying about success now, and I've made enough money so I don't have to worry about that," Alda said. "What I do concern myself with is getting more and more satisfaction from my work and trying to improve it. But I really want to have fun, and right now I'm having a great time."

Ironically, Alda’s indifference to whether he was likable or not only made him more likable in the eyes of many. He never really stood a chance of outrunning the "nice guy" label.