Actors - Steve Martin

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	Actors - Steve Martin

Stephen Glenn Martin (born August 14, 1945) is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor, musician, and composer.

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; the family was of English, Irish and Scottish descent and Martin was raised in Garden Grove, California. 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. Martin attended Santa Ana College at the same time as actress Diane Keaton.

Martin majored in philosophy at California State University, Long Beach, but dropped out. Nevertheless, 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."

Martin's girlfriend in 1967 was a dancer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and helped Martin land a job as a writer for the program by submitting his work to the show's head writer Mason Williams. Williams initially paid Martin out of his own pocket. Along with the other writers for that 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 numerous others, in numerous 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 locations. He continued to write, earning an Emmy nomination for his work on Van Dyke and Company in 1975.

Becoming a household name

In the mid-1970s he made frequent appearances as a stand-up comedian on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. That exposure, together with appearances on NBC's Saturday Night Live
(SNL) (on which, despite a common misconception, he was never a cast member) led to his first of four 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 an SNL skit where Martin and Dan Aykroyd played a couple of bumbling Czechoslovakian playboys. The album also featured a top 40 hit "King Tut", released in 1978, was backed by the "Toot Uncommons" (better known as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band). Both were million sellers. Both albums won Grammys for Best Comedy Recording in 1977 and 1978.

In these and his two other albums, Martin's stand-up comedy was self-referential, sometimes self-mocking. It mixes philosophical riffs with sudden spurts of "happy feet", deft banjo playing with balloon depictions of concepts like venereal disease. His style is off-kilter and ironic and sometimes makes fun of stand-up comedy traditions. A typical gag might be interrupted for a sip from a glass of water, and just as he was about to speak again, he forcefully spits the water onto the floor.

Movie career

By the end of the 1970s, Steve 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.

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's hit "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Steve Martin ]

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Actors - Steve Martin

Early years

Becoming a household name

Movie career

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