For other uses, see Steve Martin (disambiguation).
| Steve Martin |
Steve Martin |
| Birth name |
Stephen Glenn Martin |
| Born |
August 14 1945 (1945--) (age 62)
Waco, Texas, U.S. |
| Spouse(s) |
Victoria Tennant (1986-1994)
Anne Stringfield (2007-Present) |
| Influences |
British television, Red
Skelton, Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny,
Laurel and Hardy |
| Influenced |
Eddie Izzard, Chris Rock,
Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Will Forte, David Walliams, Bowling for Soup |
| Official site |
www.stevemartin.com/ |
|
|
Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin (born August 14, 1945) is
an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, musician and composer.
Biography
Early years
Martin was born in Waco, Texas, to Glenn Vernon Martin, a real estate salesman and aspiring actor and
Mary Lee Stewart, a housewife. Martin was raised in Garden Grove, California, and is of English,
Scottish and Irish descent.[1] Much of Steve Martin's comedy styling would be influenced by the actor,
comedian, magician Carl Ballantine. Carl performed at the opening of Disneyland and
young Steve Martin would watch his performances closely. As a teenager, Martin 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. One of Martin's acts during this time was a character he called "The Great Flydini". This magician would produce
eggs and light candles from his open zipper found on his dress slacks. Even an opera singing hand puppet would make an
appearance.
Martin majored in philosophy at California
State University at Long Beach, and for a while, considered becoming a
philosophy professor instead of an actor-comedian. In 1967, he transferred to
UCLA and switched his major to theater. Martin soon began working
local clubs at night, to mixed notices. At the age of twenty-one, he dropped out of college for good.[2] 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."[3]
While attending college, he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game. His
time there 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."[4] 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. In the early seventies, Martin embarked on an ill advised comedy tour where he was often booked into seedy venues in the
Midwest as either a solo act or an opener for down and out musical groups. His father compiled an account of these awful bookings
and frequently alluded to his son's difficulties in his monthly letter to his real estate clients. Occasionally Steve would be
booked with other comedians, most of them very bad with ineffectual gimmicks such as ventriloquism dummies, balloons, chaotic
animal acts, and musical instruments. Martin borrowed heavily from these unpleasant experiences in many of his future
routines.
But he states that his biggest influence has been British Television, its mostly
the comedies that have inspired him, but he was also inspired by its science fiction and its dramas.
Fame
In the mid-1970s, Martin made frequent appearances as a stand-up comedian on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. 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), this time based on 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 travelling
exhibit of the Egyptian king's tomb artifacts; the single reached the top 20 (# 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. 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. A typical gag might be interrupted for a sip from a glass of water and just as
he is about to speak again, he forcefully spits the water onto the floor.
Movie career
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.[4] 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.[5]
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 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.
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 5th 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, standing 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.
Other work
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). 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 honoured 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.
Coincidentally, Steve Martin was supposed to host with Prince as the musical guest on the first episode of SNL's 30th season, but
both he and Prince backed out at the last minute and were replaced by Ben Affleck and
Nelly.
Martin has also written two novellas, Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company.
Shopgirl was later turned into a film (see above).
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.
Art collection
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.[6]
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.
Marriages
On July 28, 2007, Steve married his girlfriend, Anne Stringfield, 34, at his Los Angeles home. Former Nebraska Senator
Bob Kerrey presided over the ceremony. Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, was
his best man. Several of the guests, including close friends Tom Hanks, Eugene Levy, comedian Carl Reiner, and magician/actor
Ricky Jay were not informed that a wedding ceremony would take place. Instead, they were told they were invited to a
party.[7] Robin
Williams was invited, but he felt he was too busy at the time to go to just a regular party. Steve has previously been
involved with artist Allyson Hollingsw
