Steve Martin
American comedy in the latter half of the twentieth century found new energy in stand-up performance, television sketch shows, and a wave of performers who moved fluidly between stage and screen. Steve Martin, born on August 14, 1945, in Waco, came of age during precisely that period and built a career that stretched across nearly every corner of the entertainment world.
Martin attended Garden Grove High School and Rancho Alamitos High School before going on to Santa Ana College, California State University, Long Beach, and the University of California, Los Angeles. That educational path ran alongside an expanding set of professional roles: he has worked as a comedian, actor, film actor, television actor, screenwriter, writer, film producer, television director, musician, banjoist, composer, and art collector. The range isn't decorative — each of those credits reflects work he's actually done in English-language film, television, and music over the course of his career.
What set Martin apart within his era was the breadth of what he brought to it. Where many performers of his generation concentrated in one or two areas, Martin moved between stand-up comedy, Hollywood films, writing for the page and the screen, and serious musical work as a banjoist and composer. He has also maintained a sustained engagement with the visual arts as a collector, which sits alongside rather than apart from his other work.
The honors he's received reflect recognition across multiple fields. He earned a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series and a Writers Guild of America Award, acknowledging his work as a writer. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him an Honorary Award, and the American Film Institute presented him with its Life Achievement Award. He received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the Disney Legends award. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Taken together, that list of honors — spanning writing, film, performance, and cultural contribution — offers a concrete measure of how his work has been received across the industries he's worked in.
Quotes by Steve Martin
Steve Martin's insights on:
I used to smoke marijuana. But I'll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening. Or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, mid-evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid afternoon, or perhaps the late mid afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early mid late early morning but never at dusk! Never at dusk. I would never do that.
There is one thing I would break up over and that is if she caught me with another woman. I wouldn't stand for that.
What your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.
I've run into people in my life who were so dramatic; people who are so extreme and so frustrating to be around that you end up thinking about them and talking about them for literally years after your experience with them is over. I've had that happen to me, and I've seen it happen to other people. I find it fascinating.
In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.