Curiosidades

After inviting friends including Tom Hanks, Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy to a dinner party, he married his longtime girlfriend Anne Stringfield in a surprise ceremony at their Los Angeles home.

His business card reads "This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me, and that you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny.".

He is an accomplished banjo player and appears playing the instrument in Earl Scruggs and Friends video for "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," for which he won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. This makes him rare in that he has won Grammies for both comedy and music.

He fell into depression for a couple of months when his good friend John Candy died.

He is skilled with a rope or lasso and did his own rope work in Tres amigos (1986). He also plays the harmonica.

He says his favorite movie of his own is Mejor solo que mal acompañado (1987).

He once had a job at Disneyland in the Magic Shop on Main Street, USA. He also worked for neighboring amusement park Knott's Berry Farm as a comedian in their "Birdcage Theatre". It was during these jobs that he honed his skills in live performance, such as improv comedy, banjo playing, juggling, and lassoing. It was at Knott's Berry Farm where he met his friend, Stormie Omartian.

2007: Best man during his wedding to Anne Stringfield was Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live (1975).

He told Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program "Fresh Air" that he smoked a fair amount of marijuana in the late 1960s until one night when he had a panic attack at a showing of the Mel Brooks movie Los productores (1967). After that, he never smoked pot again, and he believes that the negative experience saved him from the harder drug abuse and addiction that plagued so many of his colleagues during the next few decades.

Although many critics were disdainful of his overtly silly act early in his career, its postmodern nature was admired by avant garde filmmakers David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, both of whom approached Martin to appear in ultimately unproduced comedy films.

He was Warner Bros. second choice for the role of The Riddler in Batman Forever (1995) (after Robin Williams ). However he turned it down as with the death of his good friend John Candy and his divorce from Victoria Tennant he was too sad to make any movies.

Contrary to popular belief, Martin was never a cast member on NBC's Saturday Night Live (1975). However, he holds the records for guest appearances (25) on the show (followed closely by Buck Henry), hosting (at 15 times, he sets the standard for the SNL "Five Timers Club"), and hosting in a single season (3). He is also the only person to have hosted a season premiere, a season finale, and a Christmas show. He was also scheduled to host for the ill-fated 1980-1981 season, but a writers strike prevented this.

He is a member of Mensa, as are James Woods, Ben Rollins.

He studied philosophy at California State University at Long Beach, and for a while, considered becoming a philosophy professor instead of an actor-comedian. He periodically spoofed his philosophy studies in his 1970s stand-up act, such as comparing Philosophy with studying Geology: "If you're studying Geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but Philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.".

He is in the horn section of B.B. King's "In The Midnight Hour" music video.

He became a father for the first time at age 67.

Dated Mary Tyler Moore.

He was on an episode of The Dating Game (1965) before he was famous in 1966. He won a date with an old friend named Marscha Walker, whom he had not seen in three years. He appeared on the show again the next year and won again. He wore the same shirt and jacket.

Even though during his stand up days he said he was a "wild and crazy guy", in real life he is actually quite shy and quiet.

He is a trustee of the Los Angeles Museum of Art, and collects the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, and Pablo Picasso.

At his insistence, the 1987-1988 season premiere of Saturday Night Live (1975) (hosted by Martin) went on, despite the fact that there hadn't been a dress rehearsal. There was a fire in a nearby studio and the cast and crew were evacuated from Rockefeller Center just before dress rehearsal was scheduled to begin.

He was romantically involved with, and at one point engaged to, Bernadette Peters, with whom he worked in several films in the 1970s and '80s.

His study of philosophy was a source of much of his material for his 1970s standup act.

He is a fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969). This led to him becoming the host and narrator of the documentary Parrot Sketch Not Included: Twenty Years of Monty Python (1989).

He played the banjo in his guest appearance on the El show de los Teleñecos (1976).

He is the father, with Anne Springfield, of a daughter born in December 2012.

He lists British television (especially the comedies) as his biggest influence.

2007: Recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. Other recipients that year were Leon Fleisher, Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese, and Brian Wilson.

He learned to play the banjo by playing LPs at 16rpm speed. This approach enabled him to more accurately pick the individual notes due to the halved playback LP speed.

He was chosen as #6 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time.

Best friends with Martin Short.

He was voted Most Talented by his classmates at Garden Grove high school.

When Martin lived in his Manhattan apartment, his next door neighbor was Mary Steenburgen.

Stanley Kubrick liked his work in Un loco anda suelto (1979) and once considered having him play Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut (1999); the role that later went to Tom Cruise.

He appeared on the college circuit in the 1970s with fellow musical comedian Martin Mull as "The Steve Martin Mull Show".

He was one of the first celebrities to pay tribute to Robin Williams (on his Twitter feed) and as such his tribute was featured in many news reports on Williams' death.

He wore his Inspector Clouseau mustache during his 2007 wedding because he was reprising his role for the upcoming sequel to La pantera rosa (2006).

While filming Un par de seductores (1988), he and Michael Caine became good friends.

He co-wrote two songs with Martin Mull: "Men" appearing on the album "I'm Everyone That I Have Ever Loved" and "Westward Ho!" appearing on the album "Sex & Violins".

Although he often played fathers in many of his most successful movies of the 1980s 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s (including Parenthood, the Father of the Bride movies, and the Cheaper by the Dozen movies), Martin himself was not a father while making any of those films and eventually became one in 2012 (at the age of 67), when his daughter was born.

He was considered for the role of "Willy Wonka" in the movie Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate (2005).

Some sources state he is a fan of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who (1963). However, in a 2013 interview in the UK's "Uncut" magazine, he revealed this was not true, he knows nothing about it and he believed it had started as a false claim by someone on the internet.

In 2005: Recipient of the 8th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

He graduated from Garden Grove High School in 1963. He attended Rancho Alamitos High School in the beginning of his high school career, but then high school attendance areas were changed, and he had to start going to Garden Grove. He was also a cheerleader at Rancho and often did his King Tut dance.

His wife is a writer for The New Yorker.

Release of his children's book, "The Alphabet From A to Y: With Bonus Letter Z". (2007)

He was one of the victims of a gang of German art forgers, who made an estimated 16 million Euros. In 2004, Steve bought a counterfeit painting of the artist "Campendonk". Luckily, he sold the painting in 2006 before the forgeries were discovered.

Before Christopher Lloyd got the part, he nearly played Doc Brown in Back to the Future (1985).

He has worked with actor Eugene Levy on four different films, El padre de la novia (1991), Vuelve el padre de la novia (Ahora también abuelo) (1995), Se montó la gorda (2003) and Doce fuera de casa (2005).

His performance as "Navin Johnson" in Un loco anda suelto (1979) is ranked #66 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.