Steve Martin
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This article is about the performer. For other people with the same name, see Steve Martin (disambiguation).
| Steve Martin | |
|---|---|
Martin at the 120th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall in New York City in April 2011
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| Birth name | Stephen Glenn Martin |
| Born | August 14, 1945 Waco, Texas, U.S. |
| Medium | Concert, film, recordings, television, books |
| Years active | 1967–present |
| Genres | Surreal humor, Musical comedy, physical comedy, sketch comedy, Wit/word play Music: bluegrass |
| Spouse | Victoria Tennant (1986–1994)[1] Anne Stringfield (2007–present; 1 child) |
| Signature |  |
| Website | stevemartin.com |
| Academy Awards | |
| Academy Honorary Award (2013) | |
| Emmy Awards | |
| Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy, Variety or Music 1969: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour |
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| Grammy Awards | |
| Best Comedy Album 1978: Let's Get Small 1979: A Wild and Crazy Guy Best Country Instrumental Performance 2002: Foggy Mountain Breakdown Best Bluegrass Album 2009: The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo Best American Roots Song 2014: Love Has Come for You |
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| American Comedy Awards | |
| Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy (2000) | |
Martin came to public notice as a writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and later became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. In the 1970s, Martin performed his offbeat, absurdist comedy routines before packed houses on national tours. In 2004, Comedy Central[2] ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.
Since the 1980s, having branched away from stand-up comedy, Martin has become a successful actor, as well as an author, playwright, pianist and banjo player, eventually earning Emmy, Grammy and American Comedy awards, among other honors.
Martin was awarded an honorary Oscar at the Academy’s 5th Annual Governors Awards in November 2013.[3]
Contents
Early life
Comedy
After high school graduation, Martin attended Santa Ana Junior College, taking classes in drama and English poetry. In his free time, he teamed up with friend and Garden Grove High School classmate Kathy Westmoreland to participate in comedies and other productions at the Bird Cage Theatre. He joined a comedy troupe at Knott's Berry Farm.[10] Later, he met budding actress Stormie Sherk, and they developed comedy routines and became romantically involved. Sherk's influence caused Martin to apply to the California State University, Long Beach, for enrollment with a major in Philosophy.[10] Stormie enrolled at UCLA, about an hour's drive north, and the distance eventually caused them to lead separate lives.[15]Inspired by his philosophy classes, Martin considered becoming a 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".[16] Martin recalls wondering in a psychology class "What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation."[17] 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."[18]
In 1967, Martin transferred to UCLA and switched his major to theater. While attending college, he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game. Martin began working local clubs at night, to mixed notices, and at twenty-one he dropped out of college.[19]
Career
Early career – stand-up
In 1967, his former girlfriend Nina Goldblatt, a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, helped Martin land a writing job with the show by submitting his work to head writer Mason Williams.[20] Williams initially paid Martin out of his own pocket. Along with the other writers for the show, Martin won an Emmy Award[21] in 1969, aged 23.[10] He 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. Martin's first TV appearance was on The Steve Allen Show in 1969. He says: "[I] appeared on The Virginia Graham Show, circa 1970. I looked grotesque. I had a hairdo like a helmet, which I blow-dried to a puffy bouffant, for reasons I no longer understand. I wore a frock coat and a silk shirt, and my delivery was mannered, slow and self-aware. I had absolutely no authority. After reviewing the show, I was depressed for a week."[22] During these years his roommates included comedian Gary Mule Deer and singer/guitarist Michael Johnson.[23] Martin opened for groups such as The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, The Carpenters, and Toto. 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 1970s, his TV appearances led to the release of comedy albums that went platinum.[10] The track "Excuse Me" on his first album, Let's Get Small, helped establish a national catch phrase.[10] His next album, A Wild and Crazy Guy (1978), was an even bigger success, reaching the No. 2 spot on the U.S. sales chart, selling over a million copies. "Just a wild and crazy guy" became another of Martin's known catch phrases.[10] The album featured a character based on a series of Saturday Night Live sketches where Martin and Dan Aykroyd played "Georgi" and "Yortuk" the Festrunk Brothers, a couple of bumbling Czechoslovak would-be playboys. The album ends with the song "King Tut", sung and written by Martin and backed by the "Toot Uncommons", members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. It was later released as a single, reaching No. 17 on the U.S. charts in 1978 and selling over a million copies.[10][26] The song came out during the King Tut craze that accompanied the popular traveling exhibit of the Egyptian king's tomb artifacts. Both albums won Grammys for Best Comedy Recording in 1977 and 1978, respectively. Martin performed "King Tut" on the April 22, 1978, edition of SNL.
Decades later, in 2012, the A.V. Club described Martin's unique style and its impact on audiences:
"[Martin was] both a consummate entertainer and a glib, knowing parody of a consummate entertainer. He was at once a hammy populist with an uncanny, unprecedented feel for the tastes of a mass audience and a sly intellectual whose goofy shtick cunningly deconstructed stand-up comedy."[27]On his comedy albums, Martin's stand-up is 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, and the controversial kitten juggling (he is a master juggler). His style is off-kilter and ironic, and sometimes pokes fun at stand-up comedy traditions, such as Martin opening his act (from A Wild and Crazy Guy) 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." Or: "Hello, I'm Steve Martin, and I'll be out here in a minute."[25][28] In one comedy routine, used on the Comedy Is Not Pretty! album, Martin claimed that his real name was "Gern Blanston". The riff took on a life of its own. There is a Gern Blanston website, and for a time a rock band took the moniker as their name.[29] He stopped stand-up in 1981 to concentrate on movies and never went back.[10]
Acting career – film
Martin had a small role in the 1972 film Another Nice Mess. His first substantial film appearance was in a short titled 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. He made his first substantial feature film appearance in the musical Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he sang The Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". In 1979, Martin co-wrote and starred in The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner. The movie was a huge success, grossing over $100 million on a budget of approximately $4 million.[30]
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 friend 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 based on 1978 BBC serial by Dennis Potter. He was anxious to perform in the movie because of his 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."[31]
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, possibly his most critically acclaimed comic performance to date.[32][33] 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 singer-songwriter 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 movie musical film version of the hit Off-Broadway play Little Shop of Horrors (based on a famous B-movie), playing the sadistic dentist, Orin Scrivello. The film was the first of three films teaming Martin with Rick Moranis. In 1987, Martin joined comedian John Candy in the John Hughes movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles. That same year, Roxanne, the film adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac which Martin co-wrote, won him a Writers Guild of America Award. It also garnered recognition from Hollywood and the public that he was more than a comedian. In 1988, he performed in the Frank Oz film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a remake of Bedtime Story, 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, a romantic comedy, in which the female lead was played by his then-wife Victoria Tennant. Martin also appeared in Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, in which he played the tightly-wound Hollywood film producer, Davis, who was recovering from a traumatic robbery that left him injured, which was a more serious role for him. Martin also starred in a remake of the comedy Father of the Bride in 1991 (followed by a sequel in 1995), and in the 1992 comedy Housesitter, with Goldie Hawn and Dana Delany.
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). He went on to star with Eddie Murphy in the 1999 comedy Bowfinger, which Martin also wrote. He appeared in a version of Waiting for Godot as Vladimir, with Robin Williams as Estragon and Bill Irwin as Lucky. In 1998, Martin guest starred with U2 in the 200th episode of The Simpsons titled "Trash of the Titans", providing the voice for sanitation commissioner Ray Patterson. In 1999, Martin and Hawn starred in a remake of the 1970 Neil Simon comedy, The Out-of-Towners. By 2003, Martin ranked fourth on the box office stars list, after starring in Bringing Down The House and Cheaper By The Dozen, each of which earned over $130 million at U.S. theaters. That same year, he also played the villainous Mr. Chairman in the animation/live action blend, Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Martin wrote and starred in Shopgirl (2005), based on his own novella (2000), and starred in Cheaper by the Dozen 2. In 2006, he starred in the box office hit The Pink Panther, as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. He reprised the role in 2009's The Pink Panther 2. When combined, the two films grossed over $230 million at the box office. In Baby Mama (2008), Martin played the founder of a health food company, and in It's Complicated (2009), he played opposite Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. In 2009, an article in The Guardian listed Martin as one of the best actors never to receive an Oscar nomination.[34] In 2011, he appeared with Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and JoBeth Williams in the birdwatching comedy The Big Year.
Writing
Throughout the 1990s, Martin wrote various pieces for The New Yorker. In 2002, he adapted the Carl Sternheim play The Underpants, which ran Off Broadway at Classic Stage Company and in 2008, co-wrote and produced Traitor, starring Don Cheadle. He has also written the novellas, Shopgirl (2000), and The Pleasure of My Company (2003), both more wry in tone than raucous.[37] A story of a 28-year-old woman behind the glove counter at the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Beverly Hills, Shopgirl was made into a film starring Martin and Claire Danes.[37] The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2005 and was featured at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Austin Film Festival before going into limited release in the US. In 2007, he published a memoir, Born Standing Up, which Time magazine named as one of the Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007, ranking it at No. 6, and praising it as "a funny, moving, surprisingly frank memoir."[38] In 2010, he published the novel An Object of Beauty.
Hosting
Martin hosted Academy Awards solo in 2001 and 2003, and with Alec Baldwin in 2010.[39] In 2005, Martin co-hosted Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years, marking the park's anniversary. Disney continued to run the show until March 2009, which now[when?] plays in the lobby of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.Music
Martin first picked up the banjo when he was around 17 years of age. Martin has claimed in several interviews and in his autobiography, "Born Standing Up", that he used to take 33 rpm bluegrass records and slow them down to 16 rpm and tune his banjo down, so the notes would sound the same. Martin was able to pick out each note, and perfect his playing.Martin learned how to play the banjo with help from John McEuen, who later joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. McEuen's brother later managed Martin as well as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Martin did his stand-up routine opening for the band in the early 1970s. He had the band play on his hit song, "King Tut", being credited as "The Toot Uncommons" (as in Tutankhamun).
In 2001, he played banjo on Earl Scruggs's remake of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". The recording was the winner of the Best Country Instrumental Performance category at the Grammy Awards of 2002. In 2008, Martin appeared with the band, In the Minds of the Living, during a show in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.[40]
In 2009, Martin released his first all-music album, The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo with appearances from stars such as Dolly Parton.[41] The album won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2010.[42] Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member John McEuen produced the album.
Love Has Come For You, a collaboration album with Edie Brickell, was released in April 2013.[54] The two made musical guest appearances on talk shows, such as The View and Late Show with David Letterman, to promote the album.[55][56][57] The title track won the Grammy Award for Best American Roots Song.[58] Starting in May 2013, he is touring with the Steep Canyon Rangers and Edie Brickell throughout the United States.[59]
Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass
In 2010, Martin created the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, an award established to reward artistry and bring greater visibility to bluegrass performers. The prize includes a USD$50,000 cash award, a bronze sculpture created by the artist Eric Fischl, and a chance to perform with Martin on the Late Show With David Letterman. Recipients include Noam Pikelny of the Punch Brothers band (2010),[60] Sammy Shelor of Lonesome River Band (2011),[61] Mark Johnson (2012)[62] and Jens Kruger (2013).[63]Personal life
Martin was romantically involved with actress and singer Bernadette Peters, his costar in the films The Jerk and Pennies from Heaven, during the 1970s and early 1980s. He married actress Victoria Tennant on November 20, 1986, and the union lasted until their divorce in 1994.[64] On July 28, 2007, after three years together, Martin married Anne Stringfield, a writer and former staffer for The New Yorker magazine.[65] Former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey presided over the ceremony at Martin's Los Angeles home. Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, was best man.[65] 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, and were surprised by the nuptials.[65] At age 67, Martin became a father for the first time when Stringfield gave birth in December 2012.[66][67][68]Martin has been an avid art collector since 1968, when he bought a print by the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha.[69] In the first public display of his collection, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art presented a five-month exhibit of 28 works by Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, and Edward Hopper, among others, in 2001.[70] In 2006, he sold Hopper's Hotel Window (1955)[71] at Sotheby's for $26.8 million.[72]
Investigators at Berlin's state criminal police office (LKA) think that Martin was one victim of a German master art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. In July 2004, Martin purchased what he believed to be a 1915 work by the German-Dutch painter Heinrich Campendonk, Landschaft mit Pferden (Landscape With Horses) from a Paris gallery for what should have been a bargain price of around €700,000 (around $850,000 at the time). Before the purchase an expert authenticated the work and identified the painter's signature on a label attached to the back. Fifteen months later Martin put the painting up for sale, and auction house Christie's disposed of it in February 2006, to a Swiss businesswoman for €500,000 – a loss of €200,000. Police believe the fake Campendonk originated from an invented art collection devised by a group of German swindlers caught in 2010. Skillfully forged paintings from this group were sold to French galleries like the one where Martin bought the forgery.[73]
Martin suffers from tinnitus (ringing in the ears), which is a symptom of hearing loss. He got it while filming a pistol-shooting scene for the film Three Amigos in 1986. He has been quoted as saying, "You just get used to it, or you go insane."[74][75]
Filmography
Main article: Steve Martin filmography
Discography
Albums
| Album | Year | Peak chart positions | Certifications | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Billboard 200 [76] |
US Bluegrass [76][77] |
|||
| Let's Get Small | 1977 | 10 | — |
|
| A Wild and Crazy Guy | 1978 | 2 | — |
|
| Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band soundtrack | 1978 | 5 | — |
|
| Comedy Is Not Pretty! | 1979 | 25 | — |
|
| The Steve Martin Brothers | 1981 | 135 | — | |
| Little Shop of Horrors soundtrack | 1986 | — | — | |
| The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo | 2009 | 93[80] | 1 | |
| Rare Bird Alert[81] (with Steep Canyon Rangers) | 2011 | 43 | 1 | |
| Love Has Come For You[82] (with Edie Brickell) | 2013 | 21 | 1 | |
| Live (with Steep Canyon Rangers featuring Edie Brickell) | 2014 | — | 1 | |
| "—" denotes a title that did not chart. | ||||
Singles
| Single | Year | Peak chart positions |
|---|---|---|
| US [83] |
||
| "Grandmother's Song" | 1977 | 72 |
| "King Tut" | 1978 | 17 |
| "Cruel Shoes" | 1979 | 91 |
| "Pretty Little One" (Steve Martin and Steep Canyon Rangers featuring Edie Brickell)[84] | 2014 | — |
Music videos
| Video | Year | Director |
|---|---|---|
| "Jubilation Day"[85] | 2011 | Ryan Reichenfeld |
| "Pretty Little One"[86] | 2014 | David Horn |
Released stand-up shows
- Steve Martin-Live! (1986, VHS)
- Saturday Night Live: The Best Of Steve Martin (1998, DVD)
- Steve Martin: The Television Stuff (2012, DVD; includes content of Steve Martin-Live! as well as his NBC specials and other television appearances)
Written works by Martin
- The Jerk (1979) (Screenplay written with Carl Gottlieb)
- Cruel Shoes (1979) (Essays)
- Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays: Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the Zig-Zag Woman, Patter for the Floating Lady, WASP (1993) (Play)
- L.A. Story and Roxanne: Two Screenplays (published together in 1997) (Screenplays)
- Pure Drivel (1998) (Essays)
- Bowfinger (1999) (Screenplay)
- Eric Fischl : 1970–2000 (2000) (Afterword)
- Modern Library Humor and Wit Series (2000) (Introduction and Series Editor)
- Shopgirl (2000) (Novella)
- Kindly Lent Their Owner: The Private Collection of Steve Martin (2001) (Art)
- The Underpants: A Play (2002) (Play)
- The Pleasure of My Company (2003) (Novel)
- The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z (2007) (Children's Books illustrated by Roz Chast)
- Born Standing Up (2007) (Memoir)
- An Object of Beauty (2010) (Novel)
- Late For School (2010) (Children's book)
- The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten.: The Tweets of Steve Martin (February 21, 2012) (Collection)
Awards and nominations
Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Steve Martin
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