Alan Alda has joked that his wife considered murder during their 62 years of marriage.
The 83-year-old actor married wife, Arlene, in 1957, and after playing a divorce attorney in Noah Baumbach’s ‘Marriage Story’, he was asked if he has ever thought about getting divorced.
When asked on the podcast ‘Present Company with Krista Smith’, "Did you ever contemplate divorce in your six-decade marriage?", Alan quipped: "No, but I’m sure my wife contemplated murder."
Alan revealed in 2018, in a ‘CBS This Morning’ interview, that he has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015 and he spoke about how Parkinson’s his affected his acting career.
He said: "Sometimes I don’t know when I’m shaking … I came back from an interview, I said to Arlene, ‘It’s amazing. I must be getting better. I didn’t shake at all.’ And then I looked at video, and I didn’t know I was shaking. But, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the audience’s focus on the scene and the character, it’s just an attribute.
"Lionel Barrymore acted for 15 or 20 years in a wheelchair… all his characters were wheelchair-bound and nobody thought twice about it. I’m playing Ray Donovon’s psychiatrist on ‘Ray Donovan,’ and when they discovered I had Parkinson’s, they said, ‘you mind if we write that into the script?’… But now I’m doing scenes where the character I’m playing has a worse tremor than I have, and I have to fake it."
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological condition that destroys cells in the part of the brain that controls movement.
There is currently no cure and no way to slow the progression of the disease, however there are treatments including medication and surgery.
Parkinson’s disease itself is not fatal, but the complications from it are dangerous.
Alan Alda jokes that wife considered murder during 60-year marriage
