Gary Burghoff

In 1967, Gary Burghoff had his biggest break in acting when he was cast as Charlie Brown in the original Off-Broadway production of You\'re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The play won the Outer Circles Critics Award. Over the course of three years (one year in New York City and two years in Los Angeles), he performed the part over 1,000 times. Robert Altman was so impressed with Gary in You\'re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in Los Angeles that he gave him a screen test. That screen test led to Gary\'s part as Radar in the movie M*A*S*H. Gary was the only actor in Twentieth Century Fox\'s hit film M*A*S*H who was asked to reprise his character for the extremely successful television series. Gary received Emmy nominations for seven of his eight years on M*A*S*H. In 1977, he won the Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Unfortunately, it was the one year he didn\'t attend the awards ceremony… he was fishing. The presenter was M*A*S*H star Alan Alda, who said he was glad Burghoff could not appear because \"it gives me an opportunity to tell the world what a wonderful, gifted and outstanding person Gary Burghoff is -- something he, of course, would not say about himself.\" McLean Stevenson once said Gary \"was the best actor\" on M*A*S*H. Stevenson, who played Col. Henry Blake on the show, was Burghoff\'s closest friend on the set. Burghoff left M*A*S*H shortly after the start of its eighth season. He wanted to spend more time with his family and in an interview in The Complete Book of M*A*S*H, he discusses how he suffered from burnout. The strict scheduling required while in the series was difficult. After the third season, Gary was in fewer episodes each season due to the effect it was having on his family life. He also felt he had learned all he could from being in the series and didn\'t want to stay just for the money. After leaving M*A*S*H, he created his own All-Star Dixieland Jazz Band which recorded an album and toured some of the nation\'s jazz clubs. In regional theater, he toured five theaters doing The Owl and the Pussycat; it broke four of the theaters\' attendance records. Next, he did Woody Allen\'s Play It Again, Sam, breaking more house records