Alec Baldwin made it on the front cover of Cigar Aficionado.


Alec Baldwin is excited. The handsome 46-year-old actor can't wait to deliver a line from Twentieth Century, the Broadway revival he's starring in with Anne Heche. In the play, the actors are riding on a train returning to New York from Los Angeles, and Baldwin's character, Oscar Jaffe, is trying to woo ex-lover Lily Garland, played by Heche, back into his life. Baldwin says Garland asks if he has seen her most recent movie. He replies, "It made me want to vomit. All your talent wasted, Lily." She pulls an Oscar statuette out of a bag and says, "Well, did you see they gave me the gold statue?" Jaffe picks it up and says, "Good God, Lily, it's pathetic. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. You're not going to fall for that sort of thing?"


Baldwin, dressed casually in a black turtleneck, black jeans and a black leather jacket, sits comfortably in an oversized red velvet chair at New York's Grand Havana Room. He looks out over the glittering lights of the Manhattan skyline and guffaws with delight after repeating that last line. "I would love to give that line as a newly minted Oscar winner," he says.


That Baldwin can even use the word Oscar in a sentence about himself is a simple testament to a career that has been unexpectedly resurrected. He felt revived in mid-February as he readied himself for a trip to Hollywood to await the verdict of the academy for Best Supporting Actor. Although he didn't get an Oscar statuette for his work in The Cooler, a small-budget but critically acclaimed independent film co-starring William H. Macy and Maria Bello, the recognition of his acting performance is more than enough to help restore Baldwin's reputation, and maybe his movie career.


The heady recognition is a far cry from the territory Baldwin has occupied for the past six or seven years, a professional landscape of cable TV miniseries (Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Path to War), obscure independent films (State and Main, Outside Providence) and stage plays. In the midst of his languishing career, he also endured the dissolution of his nine-year marriage to actress Kim Basinger, a painful and often public spectacle that fueled a tabloid frenzy about him and his life. The experience apparently has left him a quieter man, less prone to outbursts that tarnished his reputation earlier in his career. Although Baldwin projects the aura of a man who has been battered and slowed and, in his words, humbled, he is definitely not beaten.


"You can go for a whole year and then one day you wake up and go, 'I'm dead', It's like The Sixth Sense. I see dead people. I'm dead and I don't even know it. You go back to try to figure out, 'What date did I die?' You realize you're just not there anymore. You don't have it anymore. You don't even have the opportunities anymore," Baldwin says, puffing on a Punch Double Corona. "The really painful thing was what my agent said to me: 'You think that people don't like you and they don't want to work with you, or that they don't appreciate you. It's not that they don't like you or appreciate you—they don't think of you at all.' All you can do is say, oh God, and go off and do TV, independent films, Broadway.


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