WWW [Fox News] – Daniel Baldwin – brother of Alec, Billy and Stephen – continues to mystify everyone around him.
This week he was arrested in Santa Monica, Calif., for grand theft auto and possession of illegal drugs. He’s out on $20,000 bail.
Baldwin has had many scrapes and embarrassing moments with the law, all due to drugs. New Yorkers will never forget a wild incident at the Plaza Hotel that brought the police and headlines several years ago.
And it’s not like Baldwin hasn’t been able to get work as an actor. As I first reported here some months ago, he appears in several of the final episodes of “The Sopranos,” which will air beginning in March 2007. In kind of a “Get Shorty” nod, Baldwin plays a bad guy with whom ‘Christafuh’ (Michael Imperioli) gets involved when he tries to make a Hollywood movie.
A source from “The Sopranos” confirmed for me that Baldwin came to work and completed it. So that’s the tragedy of addiction: even being on the most prestigious show on television isn’t enough to make him turn his life around. Sad.
What’s worse and even more embarrassing is that Baldwin has a 10-year-old son with his former “Homicide: Life on the Streets” co-star Isabella Hofmann. Lucky for him, Hofmann, a talented actress, continues to get a lot of series work. But when I recently asked a family member if Baldwin and Hofmann were married, or if he had anything to do with them, the insider replied quietly, “I don’t know.”
And it’s all the more bewildering, I would think, to brother Billy, who’s happily married with children to singer Chynna Phillips. Even brother Stephen, who surprised his family by becoming a born-again Christian, has finally settled down after years of wild living. And then there’s Alec, who despite his legal feud with ex-wife Kim Basinger and occasional public displays of frustration, is the hardest working guy in Hollywood. With very funny and memorable turns in “The Departed,” “30 Rock” and “Running with Scissors,” Baldwin should get some kind of award of this year for being everywhere and doing a good job at it.
