Mike Farrell is a well-known actor, humanitarian, and social activist.  He currently serves as Co-Chair of Human Rights Watch in California, President of Death Penalty Focus and as member of the advisory board of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. After humanitarian aid missions to Bosnia and Somalia in the 1990s, he was named Good Will Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  He is known to millions of fans as “B.J. Hunnicutt” of television’s historic “M*A*S*H” series and to others as the producer of Universal Pictures’ hit “Patch Adams.”  He recently starred in NBC-TV’s “Providence.”

A refugee aid and human rights activist for over 20 years Mike Farrell is also spokesperson for CONCERN/America, an international refugee aid and development organization.  Farrell first traveled to CONCERN sites on the Thai/Cambodian border in 1980. Through the following decade he took part in aid missions and human rights delegations to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras a number of times, after one such occasion representing the delegation in testimony before the U.S. Congress. During those same years, participation in such delegations took him to the then U.S.S.R., Paraguay and Chile. 

In 1988 he traveled to Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel, exploring opportunities for peace in the Middle East. After returning to the region in 1990, he then went directly to Prague to be part of a team of international election observers for the first free post-war elections in Czechoslovakia. A third trip to the Middle East in 1992 focused on medical programs for children. Later that same year, on behalf of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, he went first to Somalia, then to Bosnia.  In 1995, again with the UNHCR, he returned to Africa, this time to Rwanda, Zaire and Tanzania.

In the late ‘90s, he went on a mission to the U.S./Mexico border areas in California and Arizona, accompanying Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigators looking into claims of abuse against the undocumented by U.S. Border Patrol agents. In 1999, again with an HRW investigator, he toured and interviewed prisoners at McAlester State Prison in Oklahoma, with special attention to its notorious segregation facility, H-Unit.  An opponent of the death penalty and an advocate of prison reform, Farrell has visited prisons and been involved in death cases across the U.S. and in many foreign lands as part of his human rights work.  He is a founding board member of Peace Studies, ATV, and inmate-developed alternatives to violence program at Augusta Correctional Center in Virginia.  

He is married to actress Shelly Fabares and has two children (now young adults) Michael and Erin.