The Full Biography
Steve Martin. Comedian. Actor. Banjo player. The Waco kid who put an arrow through his head, sold out arenas, and then spent decades proving the clown could write.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a white three-piece suit, a banjo, an arrow apparently lodged through the skull, a man saying “Well, excuuuuse me” as if the phrase were a philosophy. The year is the late 1970s. The rooms are arenas. What the still cannot show is Stephen Glenn Martin of Waco and Garden Grove, a Disneyland magic-shop kid, a philosophy student, a television writer with an Emmy, and a man in his seventies who learned a new generation’s names on a Hulu set with Martin Short.
He was born on August 14, 1945, in Waco, Texas. The family moved to Southern California when he was a boy. His father, Glenn Vernon Martin, was a real-estate man who also acted, a combination that did not make the household easier. His mother, Mary Lee Stewart, kept the weather. They settled in Garden Grove, close enough to Anaheim that a teenager could take a job at Disneyland and treat the park as a school. He sold guidebooks. He worked at the magic shop. He learned cards, balloons, the timing of a small crowd that has already paid for something else. Knott’s Berry Farm gave him a stage at the Bird Cage Theatre. The first pressure was not Hollywood. It was a father who was hard to please and a park that paid you if the trick landed.
He studied at Santa Ana College and at California State University, Long Beach, and took philosophy seriously enough that the stand-up, when it came, had a spine under the balloons. He wrote. He submitted. In the late 1960s he joined the staff of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and, in 1969, shared an Emmy for the writing. He was in his early twenties. He had already learned that a joke on television is a piece of carpentry: measured, cut, installed before the red light dies. He wrote for other variety shows. He opened for rock bands. He built a stand-up act that refused the setup-punchline contract the clubs still treated as law.
The door was the act itself, taken to a size no comic had asked a banjo to fill. He walked on in the white suit and did not beg. He did bits that were about bits. He made the audience complicit in a joke that might not have a punchline in the old sense. He played the banjo not as a novelty only but as a real musician who happened to be standing in a comedy. The arrow-through-the-head was a novelty-shop prop and a thesis: I will wear the dumbest object in America and still control the room. Catastrophes of timing, fake-happy dances, a balloon hat: the act looked stupid on purpose so the intelligence could hide in the open. Let’s Get Small (1977) and A Wild and Crazy Guy (1978) were comedy albums that sold like rock records and won Grammys. Comedy Is Not Pretty! (1979) kept the streak. He hosted Saturday Night Live and made “King Tut” a single that the radio treated like a hit record because it was one. Arenas that had been built for guitar solos filled for a man with a balloon animal. He has written, in Born Standing Up, that he walked away from that act while it was still selling tickets, because the act had become a prison with a very large door. The walk away is the most serious joke he ever told.
The film door was The Jerk (1979), which he wrote with Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias, directed by Carl Reiner. Navin Johnson, born a poor Black child — the joke is the character’s delusion — who invents a useless handle and becomes rich enough to lose it. It was a hit. It made him a movie star in the old sense: a face on a one-sheet that could open a picture. He did not freeze the white suit. He spent the 1980s learning how to act for a camera that would not laugh on cue.
Pennies from Heaven (1981) was a grim musical he wanted more than the audience did. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and The Man with Two Brains (1983), again with Reiner, are cinephile cartoons. All of Me (1984), opposite Lily Tomlin, is the physical performance people still teach: a man and a woman sharing one body, a scene-by-scene lesson in what a shoulder can do. Three Amigos! (1986) with Chevy Chase and Martin Short. Little Shop of Horrors (1986) as a sadistic dentist, a few minutes that steal a musical. Then the two 1987 pictures that last. Roxanne, which he wrote, is Cyrano in a ski town, a long nose and a longer courtesy, a romantic comedy that is also a piece of construction. Planes, Trains and Automobiles, for John Hughes, opposite John Candy, is a Thanksgiving odyssey that made two comic actors into a brief, perfect marriage. He could be cruel on screen and still be the person you wanted to get home.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) with Michael Caine. Parenthood (1989) for Ron Howard. L.A. Story (1991), which he wrote as a love letter to a city that is easy to mock and hard to leave. Father of the Bride (1991) and its sequel put him in a George Banks suit, a remake of the Spencer Tracy weather, a domestic star turn that made him a different kind of household name. He had come a long way from the arrow. He had not abandoned the banjo. The instrument sat in the corner of the famous life like a second career waiting for its turn. The 1990s and 2000s added Bowfinger (1999), a Hollywood satire he wrote for himself and Eddie Murphy; Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), another household franchise; Shopgirl (2005), from his own novella, a quieter temperature; and The Pink Panther (2006), a Clouseau he did not need and took anyway. Some of those pictures are carpentry. Some are rent. He has never pretended every job was Roxanne. He has pretended, when it helped the scene, that a balloon animal is a kind of truth.
Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
The turn is the walk away from stand-up. Most comics milk a peak until the peak is a tribute act. Martin closed the arena door, took the film work, and then, when the film work could have been a formula, added novels, plays, essays, and a bluegrass career that was not a celebrity hobby. Picasso at the Lapin Agile put Einstein and Picasso in a bar. Shopgirl was a novella and then a film. An Object of Beauty walked the New York art world. He is a serious collector. He is also a man who will still put on a banjo and play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” as if the arena never happened.
Six things most people never knew
- Disneyland was the conservatory. Guidebooks, magic shop, Knott’s Bird Cage. A teenager learning how a crowd breathes.
- The first Emmy was for writing, not performing. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1969. Carpentry before the white suit.
- He quit stand-up at the top. Arenas still sold. He left anyway. Born Standing Up is the receipt.
- Roxanne is his construction. He wrote the modern Cyrano. The nose is a prop. The courtesy is the part.
- The banjo is not a gag that overstayed. The Crow won a Grammy in 2010. Steep Canyon Rangers. A second musicianship.
- Only Murders in the Building is a third act, not a victory lap. Co-created with John Hoffman. Short as partner. A new audience that never saw the arrow.
He married the actress Victoria Tennant in 1986; they divorced in 1994. In 2007 he married Anne Stringfield, a writer, and they have a daughter whose privacy he has guarded with a stubbornness the arena years would not have predicted. Friends describe a man who is courtly, exact, and still capable of a prank that has a second act. He received the Mark Twain Prize in 2005, Kennedy Center Honors in 2007, and an honorary Academy Award in 2013. He treated the plaques as furniture. The work remained the point.
The later years
The years after the domestic-comedy run have been a portfolio, and he has managed them like a man who does not want any single room to own him. He toured with the Steep Canyon Rangers and with Edie Brickell, making records that bluegrass people did not have to forgive. He wrote Born Standing Up (2007), a memoir of the act that is also a book about work: how a piece is built, how a prison is recognized, how a person walks out. He published novels. He walked art fairs as a collector who knows the difference between a name and a canvas. He did voice work. He showed up, now and then, in a film that wanted the particular Steve Martin temperature — kind, a little hurt, precise.
Then, in 2021, Only Murders in the Building arrived on Hulu and gave him a third mass public. He and Martin Short, partners since Three Amigos! and Father of the Bride, play aging true-crime addicts in a New York building where a corpse has the manners to appear. Selena Gomez is the younger third. Martin is a co-creator. The show is a comedy that is also a mystery that is also a piece about what it costs to stay visible. Children who had never owned Let’s Get Small learned his face. He did not update the act to chase them. He played a man their grandparents already knew, and let the writing do the rest.
The art collection is not a hobby page in a magazine. He has bought and sold with the seriousness of a person who knows a canvas can be a con, which is also the plot of An Object of Beauty. He has been sued and has sued; the New York art world is not a banjo circle. He has kept writing plays and essays. He has walked onto a late-night couch with a new book and the old courtesy. Short remains the partner who can still make him break on a mark. Anne and their daughter remain the household he will not tour. In interviews he now sounds like a man who has survived his own arena and is interested, still, in how a scene is built. That interest is the through-line from the magic shop to the Arconia. The white suit was a product. The interest was the life.
He is past eighty. The Disneyland clerk, the Smothers writer, the arena comic, the jerk, the Cyrano, the father of the bride, the banjo Grammy, the memoirist, and the man in the Arconia elevator are the same person. He has not gone back on the road with an arrow through his head. He has not needed to. The white suit is in the museum of the culture. The banjo is still in his hands. He still writes a scene as if it were a trick that has to land before the crowd walks to the next castle. That is the Disneyland education, still employed. The honorary Oscar sits with the Twain prize and the Kennedy Center medal. He treats them as furniture. The next script meeting is the evening he actually attends. Short will be in the next chair. The banjo will be in the next room. The arrow is in a drawer, if it is anywhere, and he does not need it to fill a house. The craft was never the arrow. The craft was the room.
There is no death date on this life. There is a present tense: a New York set, a California house, a daughter, a partner in Short who can still make him break, and a body of work that runs from a magic shop to a streaming comedy without asking any stop to apologize for the others.
After the spotlight moved
It moved onto a streaming show and a banjo case, which is to say it did not leave. New viewers find Planes, Trains and Automobiles every November and Roxanne whenever they need a romance that can think. The albums still startle people who thought comedy records were souvenirs. Short is still in the next chair.
He came out of Waco and a Garden Grove kitchen, learned timing at Disneyland, wrote for the Smothers Brothers, filled arenas with an arrow and a banjo, walked away, wrote Roxanne, played a father of the bride, won a bluegrass Grammy, and then built a third act in a fictional Upper West Side building. If you only remember the arrow, you have the still. If you remember the walk away, the nose, the banjo, and the Hulu set, you have him.
Portrait: Joella Marano · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons