Bankrate: Were you star struck handing Jack Benny his weekly groceries?

Farrell: Oh, indeed. My older sister brought movie magazines into the house, my dad worked at times as a carpenter at the movie studios, and in grammar school, one of my classmates was Natalie Wood, then known as Natasha Gurdin. Yes, Hollywood was everywhere, and it was also part of my fantasy in terms of a bigger, better, more important life than the one I was living. I say, kind of jokingly, that when you grow up in the lumber town, you go to work in the mill. I went to grammar school with Natalie Wood and to junior high school with Rick and Dave Nelson, so it was a reality around us.

Bankrate: Did you feel that acting would be a good career move initially?

Farrell: It's always hard to forget your childhood fantasies, and it was one that was a burning desire on my part. But I was a terribly shy kid and never spoke of it to anyone until after I graduated and got out of the service. There was always this notion in the back of my head that somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Hey, you're just what we're looking for!" I thought that I wouldn't have to put any effort into it -- that it would just sort of happen. A friend who was going about it correctly finally shamed me into going to his actor's workshop with him and that was really the beginning of my appropriate pursuit of a career.

Bankrate: You had the typical actor's salad years, presumably.

Farrell: Exactly right. It's an incredibly competitive business, with people coming from all over the world to Hollywood for films and television. When I got into the actual process, there were people all around me who were beautiful, seductive, charismatic and others who were weird and sort of kinky, but all hopeful, all with the same dream. I was on stage every time I had the opportunity and finally got some breaks in plays and a couple of jobs in television. Pretty soon, you're doing a "Hey, he went that away" kind of role, because some people thought I looked good in a uniform. As you work your way up, people get to know you and realize you don't fall dead in a faint in front of a camera, and trust you to do a little larger role.

Bankrate: How big was landing "M*A*S*H" for you?

Farrell: Oh, it was huge. I had been doing fine, I had done two prime time television series, I was under contract to Universal Studios and making a living as an actor, but there was always this sense, in television, that I didn't really want to do a lot of the goofy things that were being done in television. I held out "M*A*S*H," both the movie and the TV show, as examples of what one could do, a show with a group of really highly skilled people doing what I think is important work, both from the perspective of good entertainment and an important social message. And I just thought, how lucky can you be to be able to do something like that? Then when the opportunity came to meet the people and be considered for the role they were creating (in the show's fourth season) with the possibility of Wayne Rogers leaving, I became just as nervous as a cat, even though I had been around for a pretty long time. Suddenly this prospect of doing something that I had so admired, I was struck dumb, and just managed somehow to make my way through the process and got very, very lucky.