An epiphany came when he was 24 and acting in a soap opera, “The Doctors.” In one scene Mr. Baldwin’s character enters a hotel room and turns on the radio before he is to be killed. The casting director, Roger Sturtevant, happened to be on the set.

“Music comes on, this evocative music,” Mr. Baldwin said. “And I turn to Roger, and he was laughing.” “What’s so funny,” Mr. Baldwin asked. “He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. And he just said. ‘It’s Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique,’ ‘The March to the Scaffold.’ Everybody knows that.’ And I didn’t know that, and I felt like an idiot that I didn’t know that. And that was the beginning.”

Mr. Baldwin said he started listening to classical music on the radio in his car as he looked for work in Los Angeles. “When you’re job hunting in L.A., you could be driving three, four hours a day,” he said. If he pulled up to a studio before the piece was over, he would call the station to find out what it was. Sometimes he would wait for the end and show up late. He began collecting records.

“I never turned back,” he said.

You can read more about Alec Baldwin and what’s he’s doing with (for) classical music here.