Martin Short had seen more "death and tragedy" than any of his friends by the age of 20. The 74-year-old actor was just 12 when his older brother David was killed in a car accident, his mother died following a battle with cancer just a few years later and his dad passed away in 1969 complications from a stroke but has no idea why that sort of trauma didn't "screw [him] up" in the long run. He told The Hollywood Reporter: "All I know is that you only know your own life.
At 20, I knew things about life and death and tragedy and loss that none of my friends knew about. I don't know why this didn't screw me up. "The only thing I can think of is that these kind of life stresses either empower you or defeat you.
But I think that by surviving all that and continuing on, I developed muscles to handle the disappointments in life. "And I do think, in a weird way, it did make me braver as a performer, braver onstage. I'd try something, and if some people didn't like it, I didn't care because I didn't know them.
I was never doing this for the admiration of strangers. I was doing this to make my siblings and my friends laugh." The 'Only Murders in the Building' star tied the knot with Nancy Dolman in 1980 and went on to have Katherine, 40, Oliver, 38, and 35-year-old Henry with her but she passed away in 2010 following a long battle with cancer and even though it was an "absolutely horrible" time for the family, he has found comfort in a classic quote from author George Eliot.
He said: "I.