Martin Short

Info

Full Name: Martin Hayter Short
Date of birth: March 26, 1950 (76 years old)
Location: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Country: USA

Martin Short has been active for 39 years, participating in 20 movies that average a 6.1/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

At the Emmys on 14 September 2026 he lost best actor in a comedy for 'Only Murders in the Building' for the fifth year running. Rather than do the gracious losing face, he pulled out the speech he had written and tore it up on camera. Steve Martin photographed the pieces and posted them.

That is the public Martin Short: the one who makes the joke. What makes it worth noting is that he walked into that ceremony out of the worst year of his life, and that it wasn't the first time something like that had happened to him.

Hamilton, five children and three funerals

He was born on 26 March 1950 in Hamilton, Ontario, the youngest of five. His father, born in Ireland, was an executive at the steel company Stelco; his mother Olive was concertmistress of the city's symphony orchestra. As a boy he shut himself in the attic to tape imaginary chat shows in which he played the host and all the guests.

In 1962, when he was twelve, his eldest brother David was killed in a car crash. His mother was diagnosed with cancer around the same time and died when he was seventeen. His father died not long after, from complications of a stroke. He was orphaned at twenty.

He took a social work degree at McMaster University in 1971 and never worked a day in the field. He landed in the Toronto production of 'Godspell', which happened to contain half a generation of Canadian comics, and in 1977 he joined Second City.

SCTV, Ed Grimley and one year on 'Saturday Night Live'

His real home was SCTV, the Canadian sketch show he worked on in 1982 and 1983 with Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, John Candy and Rick Moranis. It won him his first Emmy in 1983, shared with the writing team, and it produced Ed Grimley, all vertical hair and the enthusiasm of a nine year old in a grown man's body.

From there he joined the cast of 'Saturday Night Live' for the 1984-85 season, alongside Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. He stayed one year, and it's still cited as one of the show's best. Ed Grimley got so popular that by 1988 he had his own Saturday morning cartoon.

His other creation came later and had more teeth. Jiminy Glick, a fat, tedious, badly briefed interviewer, existed to sit real stars down and leave them with nowhere to look. Short took him to 'Primetime Glick' between 2001 and 2003, which brought an Emmy nomination, and then into a film in 2004.

Franck, the wedding planner

His film career started with 'Three Amigos!' (1986) for John Landis, with Steve Martin and Chevy Chase. The following year he led 'Innerspace', Joe Dante's science fiction comedy about a miniaturised pilot who ends up inside him.

The part that made him recognisable everywhere was Franck Eggelhoffer, the wedding planner with the undecipherable accent in 'Father of the Bride' (1991), with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton. He came back for 'Father of the Bride Part II' (1995), and for years that was the character people stopped him about in the street.

He was the White House press secretary in Tim Burton's 'Mars Attacks!' (1996), and in 1994 he starred in 'Clifford', playing a ten year old boy at the age of forty-four. It flopped badly and then turned into a cult film.

A good chunk of his filmography is voice work. He was the priest Huy, paired with Steve Martin, in 'The Prince of Egypt' (1998); the robot B.E.N. in 'Treasure Planet' (2002); Jack Frost in 'The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause' (2006); the house brownie in 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' (2008); the Italian sea lion in 'Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted' (2012); several parts in 'Frankenweenie' (2012); the engineer Kurokawa in the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's 'The Wind Rises' (2013); and Grandpa Frump in 'The Addams Family' (2019).

Given something straight, he delivers. In Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Inherent Vice' (2014) he is a coked up dentist who turns up for ten minutes and walks off with the scene. He had already played a slippery lawyer in the third season of 'Damages' (2010), which brought an Emmy nomination, and in 2020 he got another for an episode of 'The Morning Show'.

In television comedy he has left recurring characters in 'Arrested Development', 'How I Met Your Mother' and 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt', where he played a plastic surgeon wrecked by his own handiwork.

He has rarely said no to anything. There is Ooblar in 'Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius' (2001), the painter Lars in '101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure' (2002), a part in 'Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil' (2011), the Jester in 'Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return' (2014) and a neighbour in 'Mack & Rita' (2022). He also shows up as a talking head in documentaries about the trade, from 'Misery Loves Comedy' (2015) to 'Spielberg' (2017).

Plenty hasn't worked. His daily chat show, 'The Martin Short Show', lasted one season across 1999 and 2000, and the variety series 'Maya & Marty', which he fronted with Maya Rudolph in 2016, didn't get a second either. Canada treats him as national property regardless: he has been an Officer of the Order of Canada since 2019, and he holds four passports, Canadian, American, British and Irish, the last through his father.

Broadway, Steve Martin and Oliver Putnam

Musical theatre has given him his cleanest wins. He took the 1999 Tony for best actor in a musical for 'Little Me', after a nomination in 1993 for 'The Goodbye Girl', and in 2006 he opened 'Fame Becomes Me' on Broadway, which he co-wrote and in which he played himself.

In 2014 he won his second Emmy, this time as a producer of the American Film Institute's tribute special to Mel Brooks, and published his memoir, 'I Must Say'. He and Steve Martin, who he met in the eighties, have spent more than a decade touring a two man show that turned into a Netflix special in 2018.

That friendship produced the best stretch of his later career. Since 2021 he has played Oliver Putnam in 'Only Murders in the Building', a broke theatre director with his ego fully intact who investigates killings in his New York building with Steve Martin and Selena Gomez. The part has brought five Emmy nominations and five Golden Globe nominations, and no awards at all.

The fourth season brought in Meryl Streep as Loretta, the actress his character ends up marrying. The sixth season has been shot in London.

Along the way he has built an unusual reputation for the business: the man everybody wants at the table. Tom Hanks has said he operates at the speed of joy, and Short puts it down to wiring, saying he has the happy gene and that his default setting is to be cheerful. He tells stories about parties in his Toronto years where Paul Shaffer played piano, Gilda Radner sang, and everyone ended up performing.

2026

He was married to the Canadian actress Nancy Dolman from 1980 until her death from ovarian cancer in August 2010. They adopted three children, Katherine, Oliver and Henry, and he never remarried. Since 2024 the press has linked him with Meryl Streep, which he denied at the time, saying they are very close friends; neither of them has ever confirmed anything.

At the end of January 2026 Catherine O'Hara died, his SCTV colleague and a friend since the seventies. Three weeks later, on 23 February, his daughter Katherine died at 42. The Los Angeles County medical examiner ruled that she had taken her own life. The family asked for privacy and left it there.

He spoke for the first time in May, when Netflix released 'Marty, Life Is Short', the documentary about him directed by Lawrence Kasdan and produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, which he dedicated to his daughter and his wife. He said she had a serious illness, mental illness, that she fought it for a long time, and that some illnesses turn out to be terminal.

Then he went back to London to film, and in September he sat in the Emmy audience again, lost again, and tore up another speech. For a man who was on his own at twenty and has spent fifty years making people laugh, there probably isn't a better summary.