Kriti Mehrotra
Although Stephen “Steve” Martin is an entertainer who needs no introduction considering his wildly successful and lasting career, his personal life has sadly not always been sunshine and roses. It’s actually true that this 78-year-old is more than content these days alongside his loving wife Anne Stringfield plus their tween daughter, yet his blood-familial relationships were often a bit shaky. This much has even been evidenced in Apple TV+’s ‘Steve! (Martin) A Documentary in 2 Pieces’ — so now, if you simply wish to learn more about the same, we’ve got the essential details for you.
Steve Marin’s Parents Have Both Passed
It was on August 14, 1945, in Waco, Texas, when homemaker Mary Lee Stewart and aspiring actor turned realtor Glenn Vernon Martin proudly welcomed Steve into their world as their second-born. However, both he as well as his elder sister Melinda primarily grew up in California, where they’d relocated around the 1950s at the behest of the former so as to enable the latter to pursue his dreams. She obviously had the best intentions at heart, yet the pressure he soon put on himself to provide for his brood was so great it led him to be a rather absent, sarcastic, strict, and tyrannical father.
According to Steve in the aforementioned original, Mary suggested at one point that she join the workforce to help out while Glenn pursued drama, but he asserted, “No wife of mine is going to work.” Thus began his journey as a primary real estate agent who was never really affectionate or emotionally open with his children, something the actor-writer portrayed in his one-act play, ‘WASP’ (1996). He also vividly remembers the fact he never once asked his parents for money upon turning ten after being chastised by Glenn for buying shorts worth $4 — $4 he’d earned himself by doing chores.
As if that’s not enough, in his 2007 memoir ‘Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life,’ Steve added that the number of caring or funny words to have ever passed between him and his father were few. “[After he’d died in 1997,] his friends told me how much they had loved him,” the entertainer penned. “…He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family. When I was seven or eight years old, he suggested we play catch in the front yard. This offer to spend time together was so rare that I was confused about what I was supposed to do. We tossed the ball back and forth with cheerless formality.”
Steve continued, “In the second grade, I was in tumbling class… One day, it was announced that there would be a tumbling competition… My father escorted me to school for what seemed like a late-night event, although I look back and realize it couldn’t have been past four pm… I was given a golden loving cup [upon winning after what seemed like hours]. My father and I walked home in the darkness, and he suggested hiding the trophy under his coat to fool my mom. The ruse didn’t work because she saw the glow on my face. This walk home is one of the few times I remember my father and me being close. In our house, my mother was called Mama, but my father was always called Glenn.”
As for his mother, Steve wrote she “had a sense of fun that was rarely displayed later in her life. She loved fashion… Melinda and I benefited from her sartorial sense; she was an avid seamstress and made clothes for us that she copied from movie magazines… And later, at age forty-five, she even managed to get some modeling jobs at local department stores. She impossibly dreamed of a glamorous life.” But alas, she could never get that in her early years; it was Steve who provided her as well as Glenn with luxury once he began thriving, unaware he’d inadvertently followed his immensely critical father’s dreams.
Yet, per Steve’s own narrative, everything he did was to get approval from the father who’d told him “He was no Charlie Chaplin” following his major movie comedic debut in the late 1970s. “My friend Terry, he said this at one point, and it kind of changed my attitude toward my parents,” the A-list star candidly expressed in the two-part production. “He said, ‘If you have anything to say to your parents, say it now because one day they’ll be gone.’ That’s when I started methodically going to visit them, talking to them; I’d take them out to lunch. You know, you realize what [my father] – – what all he went through.”
Steve then stated, “It’s a life of hopes and dreams, and [my father Glenn] was under incredible stress to support the family. It must have been unbelievable, the pressure… I have great sympathy for my father, not having the means to fulfill his dreams. I uh – – I like him. He had a great sense of humor. I had no idea. I kind of wish I could talk to him today.” After all, Glenn died at the age of 83 in 1997, with his wife Mary following at 89 in 2002 upon falling deep into the “vacant, mental decline” of confusion.
Melinda Martin Dobbs Leads a Quiet Life Today
According to reports, Melinda Martin goes by Melinda Dobbs these days, meaning she’s a proud family woman ostensibly residing around San Jose, California, where loved ones surround her at every turn. It actually even appears as if she prefers to lead a quiet life well away from the spotlight at the moment, yet we do know she has at least two adult kids, is a loving grandmother, and does her best to be a devoted aunt too. She as well as Steve are thus both doing their best to provide their brood with the open affection they rarely received as kids.
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