Word: martin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steve Martin perfected this persona in the early '70s. Then he waited until they got it. And suddenly, in 1976, they went crazy over his silver hair, his B-movie-star face, his phosphorescent white suit -- the whole look so neat, so sensible, so . . . Phil Donahue -- and the sublimely silly uses to which he put them. Phrases like "Well, excuuuuuse me!" and "Naaaah!" became schoolyard mantras, and his concerts were eliciting rock-idol squeals. "He was performing to audiences of up to 20,000," recalls David Letterman, the late-night commissar of '80s comedy. "I think that's a record...
...Starting out in movies," Martin says, "I felt very confident that I could act, because I was too dumb to know better." Well, to start out, he could act, and he did get even better. Yet the Hollywood establishment has been his toughest audience. With All of Me in 1984, he proved that he could locate the soul of a character while surrounding it with spectacular physical comedy. The New York Film Critics Circle cited him as the year's best actor, but the academy did not even nominate him. His twisted turn as Orin Scrivello, D.D.S. (Drop Dead Sadist...
...Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, try ignoring Roxanne. It is a sleeper summer hit, Martin's biggest since The Jerk. It is based on an honorable property, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. It dares to plump for the supremacy of two old-fashioned notions: romantic love as the meeting of true minds and the English language as a tool for wooing and wonder. The script challenges its star to be at once noble and fatuous, strong and swooning, utterly in control and desperately in love -- all of which Martin handles as gracefully as if he'd written it himself (which...
...then along came Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus redefined and reduced the scope of the discipline. Says Martin: "As I studied the history of philosophy, the quest for ultimate truth became less important to me, and by the time I got to Wittgenstein it seemed pointless. Then I realized that in the arts you don't have to discover meaning, you create it. There are no rules, no true and false, no right and wrong. Anyway, these were the musings of a 21-year-old kid." A 21-year-old kid who was ready...
...Martin's scheme was absurdistly simple. He would put ironic quotation marks around his nightclub act, as if cuing the audience to wonder, "Does this guy really think he's funny doing this tired stuff? Well, I don't think he's funny. In fact, he's so unfunny . . . he's funny!" But the act was largely the one he had honed for years in other venues. He developed Happy Feet in his living room. He learned juggling from the court jester at Disneyland; Steve practiced at home with croquet balls and badly bruised his fingers. Or take...