Steve Martin

Steve Martin

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Birth name: Stephen Glenn Martin
Date of birth: 14 August 1945
Place of birth: Waco, Texas, USA
Nickname: Steve
Height: 6′ (1.83 m)
Spouse: Anne Stringfield (28 July 2007 – present), Victoria Tennant (20 November 1986 – 1994) (divorced)

Famous Quote: “Comedians don’t get Oscars, so I gave up on that a long time ago. And I can’t really speak about the Oscar worthiness of my own performance. What is a movie star? A movie star is many things. They can be tall, short, thin, or skinny. They can be Democrats or skinny.”

Contact Address and Autograph: Addresses and fan mail information

Steve Martin
The Martin Stein Company, Llc.
1528 North Curson Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90046, USA 

Biography:  Stephen Glenn “Steve” Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American comedian, actor, writer, playwright, producer, musician and composer. This silver-haired, physically expressive performer successfully shifted from being one of the most popular standup comics of the 1970s to a respected film actor of the 80s and 90s. Steve Martin began performing his material in clubs in the late 60s before establishing his reputation as a sharp TV comedy writer. 

He won an Emmy for his work on the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1972 and less than a decade later returned to performance. It wasn’t long before Martin was a comedy superstar, filling stadiums, releasing platinum records, coining catch-phrases (“Well excuuuse me!”) and making zany, inspired appearances on “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live”. He even enjoyed a highly popular single on the pop record charts with his half-spoken, half-sung comic rendition of “King Tut”. Martin launched a successful film career with “The Jerk” (1979), a hilariously silly comedy whose success paved the way to feature careers for other 70s comedians including Robin Williams and Billy Crystal.

Martin was born in Waco, Texas, the son of Mary Lee (née Stewart), a homemaker, and Glenn Vernon Martin, a real estate salesman and an aspiring actor. Martin was raised in Garden Grove, California, and is of English, Scottish and Irish descent. One of Steve’s earliest memories is of seeing his father, as an extra, serving drinks onstage at the Call Board Theatre on Melrose Place. During the war, in England, Glenn had appeared in a production of Our Town with Raymond Massey. Years later, he would write to Massey for help in Steve’s fledgling career, but would receive no reply. Yet he was not always so helpful. Expressing his affection through gifts of cars, bikes etc, he was not emotionally open to his son. He was proud of the boy but extremely critical, Steve later recalling that in his teens his feelings for his dad were mostly ones of hatred. As a teenager, he started out working at the Magic Shop at Disneyland, where he developed his talents for magic, juggling, playing the banjo and creating balloon animals. He teamed up with friend and Garden Grove High School classmate Kathy Westmoreland to do a musical comedy routine, performing at local coffee houses and at the Bird Cage Theater in Knott’s Berry Farm, also at the Golden Bear.

Martin majored in philosophy at California State University, Long Beach, and for a while considered becoming a philosophy professor instead of an actor-comedian. His time at college changed his life: “It changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, ‘Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!’ Then it gets real easy to write this stuff, because all you have to do is twist everything hard you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up, that it’s easy… and it’s thrilling.” Martin periodically spoofed his philosophy studies in his 1970s stand-up act, comparing philosophy with studying geology. “If you’re studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.”

In 1967, he transferred to UCLA and switched his major to theater. While attending college, he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game. Martin soon began working local clubs at night, to mixed notices. At the age of twenty-one, he dropped out of college for good. Martin’s girlfriend in 1967 was a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She helped Martin land a writing job with the show by submitting his work to head writer Mason Williams. Williams initially paid Martin out of his own pocket. Along with the other writers for the show, Martin won an Emmy Award in 1969. Martin also wrote for John Denver (a neighbor of his in Aspen, Colorado, at one point), The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. He also appeared on these shows and several others, in various comedy skits.

Martin also performed his own material, sometimes as an opening act for groups such as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and The Carpenters. He appeared at San Francisco’s The Boarding House, among other venues. He continued to write, earning an Emmy nomination for his work on Van Dyke and Company in 1976. He was roommates with comedian Gary Mule Deer and singer/guitarist Michael Johnson in the late 1960s.

In the mid-1970s, Martin made frequent appearances as a stand-up comedian on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson[7]. That exposure, together with appearances on HBO’s On Location and NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL) (on which, despite a common misconception, he was never a cast member) led to his first of three comedy albums, Let’s Get Small. The album was a huge success; one of its tracks, “Excuse Me”, helped establish a national catch phrase. His next album, A Wild and Crazy Guy, was an even bigger success, reaching the #2 spot on the sales chart in the U.S. and featured another catch phrase (the album’s title), also featured in a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Martin and Dan Aykroyd played a couple of bumbling Czechoslovakian would-be playboys, the Festrunk Brothers. 

The album ended with a song “King Tut”, sung and written by Martin and released as a 45 RPM single during the King Tut craze that accompanied the extremely popular traveling exhibit of the Egyptian king’s tomb artifacts; the single reached #17 in 1978. The song was backed by the “Toot Uncommons” (they were actually members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band). The album was a million seller. Both albums won Grammys for Best Comedy Recording in 1977 and 1978, respectively. Steve performed “King Tut” on the April 22, 1978 edition of SNL. In his comedy albums, Martin’s stand-up comedy was clearly self-referential and sometimes self-mocking. 

It mixes philosophical riffs with sudden spurts of “happy feet”, banjo playing with balloon depictions of concepts like venereal disease. His style is off-kilter and ironic, and sometimes pokes fun at stand-up comedy traditions, such as Martin opening his act by saying, “I think there’s nothing better for a person to come up and do the same thing over and over for two weeks. This is what I enjoy, so I’m going to do the same thing over and over and over….I’m going to do the same joke over and over in the same show, it’ll be like a new thing.” While on Saturday Night Live, Martin became very close with several of the cast members. One was Gilda Radner. When Radner passed away from ovarian cancer in 1989, Martin was getting ready to do a SNL sketch when he heard the news. He got rid of the sketch and showed a video clip of him and Radner in 1978. He introduced the clip to the audience and became overcome with grief and started to cry.

While Martin’s laudably lowbrow early movies gave little indication of career longevity, the 80s saw him develop into a leading comic actor and capable dramatic player in films including the off-beat revisionist musical drama “Pennies From Heaven” (1981) and the unremarkable but pleasant mainstream comedy of “Parenthood” (1989). His most outstanding performances include his award-winning work in the farce “All of Me” (1984), in which his confused body had to accommodate the spirit of both his own personality as well as that of a woman (Lily Tomlin), and his surprisingly touching and graceful acting in “Roxanne” (1987), a modern-day comic revamp of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

By the end of the 1970s, Martin had acquired the kind of following normally reserved for rock stars, with his tour appearances typically occurring at sold-out arenas filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans. But unknown to his audience, stand-up comedy was “just an accident” for him. His real goal was to get into film. Martin’s first film was a short, The Absent-Minded Waiter (1977). The seven-minute long film, also featuring Buck Henry and Teri Garr, was written by and starred Martin. The film was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Film, Live Action. His first feature film appearance was in the musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he sang The Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. In 1979, Martin wrote and starred in his first full-length movie, The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner. The movie was a huge success, grossing over $73 million on a budget of far less than that amount.

The success of The Jerk opened more doors for Martin. Stanley Kubrick met with him to discuss the possibility of Martin starring in a screwball comedy version of Traumnovelle (Kubrick later changed his approach to the material, the result of which was 1999′s Eyes Wide Shut). Martin was executive producer for Domestic Life, a prime-time television series starring Martin Mull, and a late-night series called Twilight Theater. It emboldened Martin to try his hand at his first serious film, Pennies From Heaven, a movie he was anxious to do because of the desire to avoid being typecast. To prepare for that film, Martin took acting lessons from director Herbert Ross, and spent months learning how to tap dance. The film was a financial failure; Martin’s comment at the time was “I don’t know what to blame, other than it’s me and not a comedy.”

Martin was in three more Reiner-directed comedies after The Jerk: Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid in 1982, The Man with Two Brains in 1983 and All of Me in 1984. In 1986, Martin joined fellow Saturday Night Live veterans Martin Short and Chevy Chase in ¡Three Amigos!, directed by John Landis, and written by Martin, Lorne Michaels, and Randy Newman. It was originally entitled The Three Caballeros and Martin was to be teamed with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. In 1986, Martin was in the musical film version of the hit off-Broadway play Little Shop of Horrors (based on a famous B-movie), as a sadistic dentist, Orin Scrivello. The film also marked the first of three films teaming Martin with actor Rick Moranis. In 1987, Martin joined comedian John Candy in the John Hughes movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles. That same year, the Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation Roxanne, a film Martin co-wrote, won him a Writers Guild of America award and more importantly, the recognition from Hollywood and the public that he was more than a comedian. In 1988, he performed in the Frank Oz comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels alongside Michael Caine.

Martin starred in the Ron Howard film Parenthood, with Moranis in 1989. He later met with Moranis to make the Mafia comedy My Blue Heaven in 1990. In 1991, Martin starred in and wrote L.A. Story and was a member of the ensemble existentialist tragedy Grand Canyon that were both about life in Los Angeles. In a serious role, Martin played a tightly wound Hollywood film producer trying to recover from a traumatic robbery that left him injured. In contrast to the serious tone of Grand Canyon, Martin also appeared in a remake of the comedy Father of the Bride in 1991 (followed by a sequel in 1995).

In the 90s, Martin became a Hollywood hyphenate producing, writing and starring in the quirky romantic comedy “L.A. Story” (1991) opposite then-wife Victoria Tennant. Although fine in a dramatic stretch as a Joel Silver-like producer in Lawrence Kasdan’s “Grand Canyon” (1991), he enjoyed perhaps his greatest commercial successes in light Disney comedies, starring as the put-upon dad in the remake of “Father of the Bride” (1991) and “Housesitter” (1992) as an uptight architect whose life is disrupted by female grifter Goldie Hawn. He reunited with Keaton in 1995 for the warm-hearted sequel “Father of the Bride II” and with Hawn for the lackluster 1999 remake of “Out of Towners”. Whereas Martin’s earlier films expertly showcased his manic qualities, his later work demonstrated his competence as a straight man and comic foil.

Martin subsequently attempted to stretch himself as a film performer but the results were uneven and commercially unsuccessful. He proved light on his feet if ultimately joyless and opaque playing a charlatan faith healer in the largely dramatic “Leap of Faith” (1992). Martin returned to Disney’s Touchstone division for an atypical assignment as executive producer and scripter of “A Simple Twist of Fate” (1994), a polished yet problematic adaptation of George Eliot’s “Silas Marner”. He was effective as a gloomy recluse who reconnects with life by raising an infant girl abandoned on his doorstep but audiences detected a downer and steered clear. Martin returned to more conventional comedy with “Mixed Nuts” (1995), a remake of a French film (“Le Pere Noel est une ordure”) about a telephone crisis center. The Christmas-themed comedy proved a critical and commercial disaster despite major talents before and behind the camera including writer-director Nora Ephron, Madeline Kahn, Rob Reiner, Juliette Lewis and Garry Shandling.

In 1993, Martin made his debut as a playwright with “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a comic fantasy about a meeting between the celebrated painter and Albert Einstein in a Paris bar in 1904 shortly before they achieved worldwide fame. The one-act play started out in an Australian workshop and had its premiere in Chicago as a Steppenwolf Theatre Company presentation. The show became a hit in Los Angeles in 1994 where its originally scheduled six-week run was extended to nine months. “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” opened Off-Broadway in the fall of 1995 to respectable reviews and a healthy box office. “WASP and Other Plays” followed soon after at the Public Theater to further confirm Martin’s status as a significant new voice on the theater scene.

In David Mamet’s 1997 thriller, The Spanish Prisoner, Martin played a darker role as a wealthy stranger who takes a suspicious interest in the work of a young businessman (Campbell Scott). In 1999, Martin and Goldie Hawn starred in a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon comedy, The Out-of-Towners. By 2003, Martin ranked 4th on the box office stars list, after co-starring in Bringing Down The House and starring in Cheaper By The Dozen, each of which earned over $130 million at U.S. theaters. Both were family comedies.

Having taken a few years off from films to concentrate on his writing, Martin returned to the big screen in 1998 in two vastly different movie roles. He delivered a strong supporting turn as a mysterious businessman in David Mamet’s psychological drama “The Spanish Prisoner” and lent his voice to the wily servant Hotep in DreamWorks’ animated Moses musical “The Prince of Egypt”. The following year he combined his two loves, penning the sharp, witty “Bowfinger” (1999), a hilarious satire that successfully skewered Hollywood stereotypes. Martin portrayed Bobby Bowfinger, an unsuccessful producer who convinces several other bottom feeders he has gotten the world’s biggest action star (fellow “SNL” alum Eddie Murphy) to appear in his inane alien movie “Chubby Rain”. In reality, he sets the C-list actors up to interact with Murphy in public so he can film the star without his knowledge. After a brief turn in director Stanley Tucci’s serious-minded “Joe Gould’s Secret” (2000), Martin continued to undertake more dramatic roles when he played a dentist suspected of murdering a patient in the thriller “Novocaine” (2001). Lest anyone think he had lost his sense of humor, Martin executive produced NBC’s little-seen sketch comedy series “The Downer Channel” (2001) and displayed his rapier wit skewering Hollywood and his colleagues while genially hosting the Academy Awards ceremonies in 2001 and 2003.

The laugh-streak continued when Martin joined Grammy winner and Oscar nominee Queen Latifah for the hit comedy feature “Bringing Down The House” (2003). Martin portrayed a lonely, recently divorced attorney who decides to look for love on the Internet. What he finds is an incarcerated woman (played by Latifah) who breaks out of jail and wreaks havoc upon his ordinarily boring life. Later that year in “Looney Tunes: Back In Action”–a mix of live action and animation starring Bugs Bunny and the famous Warner Brothers cast of cartoon icons–Martin threw off his now well-worn uptight act and cut loose in the manic old school style of “The Jerk,” playing the villainous Chairman of the Acme Corporation. Appearing in even further family-oriented fare, Martin teamed with Bonnie Hunt as the parents to a dozen demanding children in the mild 2003 remake of “Cheaper By the Dozen,” a role he reprised for the 2005 sequel.

Off-screen, Martin developed a successful side career as a writer of prose. His 2001 novella “Shopgirl,” about a depressed glove saleswoman at a Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus, was a bestseller, as was 1999′s “Pure Drivel,” a collection of his whimsically absurdist essays for New Yorker magazine. “Shopgirl” was ultimately translated into a 2005 film starring Martin, who also penned the screenplay, as the well-to-do suitor of a glove salesgirl in Beverly Hills (Claire Danes), who is also pursued by a less successful would-be beau (Jason Schwartzman). Martin then reprised his role as overburdened parent in the sequel “Cheaper By the Dozen 2” (2005). He then took on the iconic role of the classic Peter Sellers character Inspector Clouseau in the comedy remake “The Pink Panther” (2006) a role some commented was too big for even Martin to fill. 

In 2005, Martin wrote and starred in Shopgirl, based on his own novella. Martin played a wealthy businessman who strikes up a romance with a Saks Fifth Avenue counter girl (Claire Danes). He also starred in Cheaper by the Dozen 2 that year. Martin’s last work to date was the 2006 installment of The Pink Panther, attempting to stand in Peter Sellers’ shoes as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. In 2007, he announced on his website that he would likely be starting work on the sequel later in the year.

Throughout the 1990s, after Tina Brown took over The New Yorker, Martin wrote various pieces for the magazine. They later appeared in the collection Pure Drivel. He appeared in a version of Waiting for Godot as Vladimir (with Robin Williams as Estragon and Bill Irwin as Lucky). In 1993, Martin wrote the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had a successful run in several American cities. In 1998, Martin guest starred with U2 in the 200th episode of The Simpsons titled Trash of the Titans. Martin provided the voice for sanitation commissioner Ray Patterson. In 2001, Martin hosted the 73rd Annual Academy Awards. Also in 2001, he played banjo on Earl Scruggs’ remake of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”. Martin called fellow comedian and banjo player Billy Connolly to tell him, prompting the cry of “you lucky bugger!” Connolly’s wife thought he was referring to Martin being chosen as the Oscar’s host. The recording was the winner of the Best Country Instrumental Performance category at the following year’s Grammys. In 2002, Martin adapted the Carl Sternheim play The Underpants, which ran Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company. In 2003, Martin hosted the Academy Awards for the second time.

In 2005, Martin hosted a film along with Donald Duck, Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years, which was intended to show at Disneyland until the end of Disneyland’s 50th anniversary celebration in September 2006, but it is continuing to run indefinitely. Martin was also honored in 2005 with a Disney Legend award, acknowledging Martin’s early career at Disneyland and connections with The Walt Disney Company throughout his career. Martin has guest-hosted Saturday Night Live 14 times, as of his February 2006 hosting (musical guest: Prince featuring Tamar), breaking his previous record of 13 (now held by fellow frequent host Alec Baldwin) and retaining his title as SNL’s most frequent host.

Martin has also written two novellas, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company. Shopgirl was later turned into a film (see above). In 2007, he published a memoir, Born Standing Up. Time magazine’s Lev Grossman named it one of the Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007, ranking it at #6, and praising it as “a funny, moving, surprisingly frank memoir.” In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian’s Comedian, Martin was voted one of the top 15 greatest comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. On October 23, 2005, Martin was presented with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Martin is an avid art collector, particularly modern American art, and a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Martin’s personal collection has at one time included the art of Georgia O’Keeffe, John Henry Twachtman, Richard Diebenkorn, Po Shun Leong, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Pablo Picasso. In 2005, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, announced that Martin had pledged US$1 million over five years for the museum’s American art collection. Three-quarters of the gift will be used for exhibitions, with the remainder being used for acquisitions. Before he made his pledge, Martin loaned paintings to the museum, helped it acquire a sculpture by John Gregory, and sponsored an exhibition of “sugar paintings” by 19th century American artist Eastman Johnson. Jessica Todd Smith, the museum’s American art curator, said Martin became an “enthusiastic” supporter of The Huntington after he visited the museum in 2002 while filming a movie nearby.

Along with the other writers for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Steve won an Emmy Award in 1969. In 1978 Steve won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for Let’s Get Small, and in 1979 for A Wild and Crazy Guy. He shared a 2001 Grammy award for Best Country Instrumental Performance with Earl Scruggs (and others) for his banjo performance of Foggy Mountain Breakdown. On October 23, 2005, Martin was presented with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Martin was honored at the 30th Annual Kennedy Center Honors on December 1, 2007.