With his family residing in New Jersey, Alan Alda made great sacrifices to work as a Hollywood actor. “It’s not easy for me to be separated from my wife and daughters, 12, 13, and 14, during the four months of series’ shooting,” the actor said during an interview with The San Francisco Examiner. “But separation is better than uprooting the family.”

This meant that the M*A*S*H star was very particular about the roles he took on. Alda wasn’t interested in playing a character he thought was entertaining, or even starring in a film that would earn him a bit of extra cash. Alda was solely concerned with starring in films and television that he felt aligned with his personal moral values.

In the same interview, Alda confessed that he refused opportunities in various successful films because he didn’t agree with the messaging. “I turned down the lead in Rosemary’s Baby, in quite a few other movies, too,” said Alda. “I believe it is wrong to glorify brutality, to illustrate war unless you show that war is bad.”

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On his series, M*A*S*H, Alda worked hard to ensure that he and the rest of the cast and crew portrayed war in an honest light.

“I didn’t want to do a show in which war was a fun place to be,” Alda said during an interview with The Courier-Journal. I think it’s the only comedy on television in which the effects of war are seen, are shown. It emphasizes the sad fact that people get hurt in a war and get killed in some cases. It’s not as though the show were a soapbox thing. We simply show the way things are.”