You Know You’re An Icon If…
Every late-night talk show host and Saturday Night Live alum you meet cites you as a comedic influence; you were part of the original 1972 Toronto Godspell cast; you hold a Tony Award record for most nominations (as a featured actress in a musical) and are tied for most wins; you accept the Hollywood Reporter Women In Entertainment Canada Icon Award while performing a rap that Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote just for you and your most famous SCTV character: “What am I supposed to do? Shrivel up and cry now? / Menopause and then applause and “Thank you, can I die now?” / What, I’m pushin’ sixty? So, suddenly I’m sickly? / Hey, suck this Dixie cup, I am Edith Prickley!”
Andrea Martin, who’s actually pushing 80, is on stage – hands in the air, waving them like she just don’t care. Forget the signature leopard-print costume that Martin wore when she portrayed the bombastic SCTV station manager back in the ’80s, tonight she is channeling Edith Prickley in a bright red Herrera dress and matching Manolo Blahnik heels – “I can garden, I can bake. I can shimmy, I can shake / You can stay on Golden Pond, I’m skinny dipping in this lake.” The crowd is in raptures. But only three days before, when Martin was on a Zoom interview with me – from her west-end Toronto home, which sits on a pond in High Park – she had her head in her hands, attempting to make sense of it all. “I’m trying to understand what the word ‘icon’ means as it applies to me,” she says. “I’ve been down the rabbit hole of AI on that. It’s complicated – I guess this is given to people because it’s almost the end. But that is not true. So I prefer to just go about my life.”
It’s certainly not the end. Martin is currently on Broadway in Celebrity Autobiography and is shooting three TV shows this summer – in one, Count My Lies, she’ll play the grandmother of the child version of Lindsay Lohan’s character. “It said grey hair,” Martin tells me with a laugh. “I don’t know if I’ll be doing that. I don’t want to work that badly.” And most likely, there are going to be many more of these kinds of awards in her future – after all, it’s been a pretty iconic career (see above). “Okay, let’s put a positive spin on this,” she says. “It’s so lovely that people want to recognize me for something that I’ve loved doing all my life and thank god I still have opportunities. And so much of that is making people happy and laughing and joyful. So that’s a beautiful legacy.”
According to Martin’s sister Marcia, who followed Andrea to Toronto from their family home in Portland, Maine – the daughters of Armenian immigrants who owned grocery stores and restaurants – and became a top executive at Citytv: “Even when she was three or four, and my parents would have dinner parties, Andrea was entertaining. She would break into song, always making us laugh.” But, Marcia adds, her sister is not always “on” and has her moments of introspection and worry. “You might find that from a lot of people going into the limelight because there’s always a sense of insecurity in anybody that’s making their living on camera,” she says “You’re judged all the time. And especially when you’re a comedian because everyone expects whatever comes out of your mouth to be funny.”
Martin, without seeming disingenuous or inauthentic, refuses to see herself as anything other than who she was when she started out. “My mentality since I was growing up is, I’m just a little girl in search of a play to do,” she says. And her 2014 memoir, Lady Parts, is filled with a lifetime’s worth of self-esteem issues, disorders (including bulimia) and fears, as well as all the hilarious stories you’d expect. “As a comedienne, I’ve been able to hide the varying degrees of anxiety I’ve suffered all my life,” she writes. “Yup, I’m just a funny, wacky kind of gal. No need to run away. I won’t hurt you.” She’s also too accommodating for a Hollywood legend – approachable and likely has a hard time saying no to a favour. In my case, she tracks down her famous friends for me to talk to – and sets up the interview times herself (which is just not how it’s done). “I love this woman,” says Canadian TV and radio host Marilyn Denis, who had countless, laugh-’til-you’re-crying sitdowns with the comedian over the years. “When Andrea Martin talks to you, she makes you feel that you matter – that she sees your value and truly cares.”
There’s just no getting her to see things as we see them. When I bring up her years on the stage at Second City in Toronto, she says, “I don’t think I ever felt comfortable doing improvisation. That really was not in my skill set, honestly.” Fact: When she went from the success of the comedy club to the scripted SCTV, she did all of her writing through improvising the scenes first – and she won two Emmys for it. While reminiscing about all her memorable characters, she’s said, “Despite my years at SCTV, I’m not a good impersonator. It’s hard to play someone else.” Fact: Liza Minnelli took her aside one day and said, “I saw you do me. You’re fantastic.” When reminded of all the women in comedy she’s influenced, like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Martin says, “I think of them as larger-than-life stars. And I don’t think of myself like that. I think I’m really an actress for hire who managed to work with some really great people, like Tina and Amy.” Fact: Fey has not only taken multiple chances to collaborate with her idol (especially on the sitcom Great News) but had this to say about Martin’s memoir: “I have loved Andrea Martin from afar for many years, but now, after reading this funny and heroically honest book, I would like to take things to the ‘next level’ and marry her.” Martin makes one last attempt to make her point. “But do I think I’m a singular entity and I’m going to draw attention and I’m going to sell out 5,000 seats or so? I don’t think of myself that way. I guess I don’t think of myself as able to stand on stage alone.” Fact: She’s performed two one-woman shows which toured across North America – one of which, Nude, Nude, Totally Nude, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for best solo show.
Okay, she admits, with a giant laugh, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
If Martin can’t see it for herself and doesn’t trust the accolades, awards and applause, maybe she’ll take the word of her close friend Martin Short, who, of course, is also an icon. “Here’s the headline on Andrea,” he tells me. “She is – and there is no disagreement on this, if you ask Eugene Levy or Paul Shaffer or anyone from those Godspell and SCTV days – Andrea was and is the funniest out of everyone. The funniest in the moment, the most original, the kind of comedic energy that I don’t think anyone had ever experienced.”
But because Marty, as Andrea calls him, may be biased – considering the two of them honeymooned together (more on that later) – he shares yet another icon’s take on his dear friend. “I was in rehearsals for my first Broadway show, The Goodbye Girl, in 1992, written by Neil Simon. And Andrea had just opened on Broadway in My Favorite Year – for which she would win a Tony. And Neil Simon went to see her play – and I hadn’t seen it yet. So I asked him, ‘How’s Andrea Martin in it?’ And he said, ‘You know, it’s very interesting how you sit in an audience and watch an ensemble cast, and you look around and you kind of go, I think I’ll look at…her, and that’s what I did with Andrea and my eyes never left her.’” Short takes a beat, then says, “And that’s Neil Simon.”
SHE’S COMING TO CANADA
At her 2018 induction into Canada’s Walk of Fame, Martin regaled the crowd with stories about her adopted home. “I showed the border guard the $700 I had in my pocket and the address in Toronto at which I planned to stay, Clinton Street, a short distance from Honest Ed’s, where I bought my first set of steak knives for $3.99,” she said in her speech. She had left Maine to go to college in Boston and then did a short stint in New York City, where she had landed a role in the touring company of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. She played Lucy and fell in love with the boy who played Linus and followed him home to Toronto: “On that day in July 1970, my passport was stamped ‘landed,’ and up until November [of 2017] when I became a Canadian citizen – one of the proudest days of my life – I’ve been a landed immigrant for 47 years, an immigrant you continually welcome with open arms.”
Besides the steak knives, Martin tells me she felt a kinship with the city when she stumbled upon a Peter Pan statue in a Toronto park. “I don’t know why it signified the feeling of home, comfort or safety. But that little statue kind of welcomed me. And I’ve thought about that for many years since then,” she says. “Maybe it was because it was full of whimsy and innocence, and that’s where I was at that age for sure.” Within days, she walked into an agent’s office and was hired on the spot, got some commercial work and appeared as a semi-nude extra in the late director Ivan Reitman’s first film, Foxy Lady, which also featured Eugene Levy.
“I met Andrea on March 25, 1972,” says Short, very specifically. “Yeah, I know I have a bit of a Rain Man thing. It was the Godspell callback, the day we all got hired. Eugene and I were already best friends; he had made a movie with Andrea and so he introduced me to her.” Short, who’s reaching out from London where he’s shooting the new season of Only Murders in the Building with Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Meryl Streep, recalls, “There were 500 people there that day and they were whittling us down – it was like American Idol. But that group, you know, it was Gilda [Radner, who passed away in 1989] and Andrea and Victor [Garber] and Paul Shaffer and Eugene and myself – we’re all still the closest of friends.
Andrea remembers it just a little bit differently because she wasn’t actually hired that day. “Some of us didn’t get to stay,” she says, of the mass audition. “Marty was one of them that did. But I left the callbacks depressed.” It wasn’t until a few weeks later when Levy phoned the front desk at the Vic Tanny gym, knowing Andrea would be there having a sauna, to tell her the girl who sings Day By Day had left the show. Says Andrea: “Eugene thought if I showed up [at a cast party that night] as my wacky, character-y self, the director would see me and give me the job.” And the rest is history – one that is celebrated in an upcoming documentary, You Had To Be There, which has a subtitle that says it all: “How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (In a Canadian Kind of Way).”
SECOND CITY TO SESAME STREET
To this day, Andrea is still getting roles at parties. John Hoffman, the producer of Only Murders in the Building, got to know Andrea at a birthday party Steve Martin was throwing for her. “She got up from the table after a full meal and planted herself on Steve’s carpet underneath the dining room table and started planking,” Hoffman told Vanity Fair. “We’re all counting out the seconds. She went beyond two-and-a-half minutes.” After that, he wrote the character of Joy Payne (a love interest for Steve) with Andrea in mind – and was not surprised to see how completely she embodied the “sexy and kind of insane” role.`
The success of Only Murders and, before it, the Canadian-turned-worldwide-sensation Schitt’s Creek have now introduced Gen Zers to some of the stars of SCTV. But Gen Xers and Millennials have long-appreciated the nine-person, mostly Canadian cast – made up of Short, Levy, John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis and Americans Martin, Harold Ramis and Joe Flaherty – for not just the six seasons of the sketch show (now streaming on Prime), but for their laugh-out-loud antics in movies, sitcoms and as the funniest late-night talk-show guests from the ’80s onward. Andrea, in particular, stole the show as Aunt Voula in the My Big Fat Greek Wedding movies, and in her guest spots on hit sitcoms like Will & Grace, 30 Rock and Modern Family. Plus, she played a formative role in the lives of many generations thanks to her numerous appearances on Sesame Street from 1987 to 2009, often reprising her SCTV characters opposite Oscar the Grouch, Ernie and Elmo. But as it’s revealed in one brand-new nostalgic documentary after another – John Candy: I Like Me; Marty, Life is Short and an upcoming Netflix doc about SCTV (started by Martin Scorsese and continued by Jimmy Kimmel) – their genre-defining comedy is just one part of this Canadian success story. The other is their rare and irrepressible bond.
SCTV hit the air just one year after SNL, and the shows will forever be connected through overlapping casts, formats and the fact that, in the U.S., SCTV followed SNL on NBC at 1 am. But behind-the-scenes, they couldn’t have been more different. “We were in Toronto,” says Martin, of the first few years. “So there wasn’t the pull of being famous or what that even meant, or who was going to get what interview, nobody thought about that. Really, we just thought about making each other laugh and filling up 90 minutes of material.”
The stars were supportive of each other and not competitive; they became a family, with Andrea and Marty even more so than the others: “She married my brother-in-law,” says Short, referring to their respective spouses, siblings Nancy and Bob Dolman. “Nancy and I got married on December 22, 1980, and Andrea and Bob got married December 27 – and then the four of us honeymooned together in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.” They spent every Sunday dinner together and their kids all grew up as first cousins. And when the SCTV production was moved to Edmonton, the entire cast and their spouses and children grew even closer. “My life for my seven years with SCTV was not about me,” writes Andrea in her book. “It was about the nine of us. We were all blindfolded from the rest of the world and locked in a time capsule of collaboration and creative freedom.”
They were aware that Johnny Carson and David Letterman, along with SNL players like Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, were fans of the show during the time it was airing. But they had absolutely no idea of the impact they were having on the future of comedy: that a young Conan O’Brien, Judd Apatow, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Samantha Bee, Bill Hader, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Mike Myers, The Kids in the Hall, The Simpsons creators and many more were staying up very late to watch them – or were discovering them in syndication. “SCTV did such a smart sketch show that, in so many ways, had all these levels that SNL could never have,” O’Brien has said on his podcast. “For me, and a lot of the comedy writers, performers and producers of my generation, SCTV is the show.”
“We were filming in the dark, really,” says Martin, referring to those long, cold winters in Edmonton, where they were shooting in a windowless basement for 17 hours a day. “There was no studio audience; we didn’t know what was going on in the world and how much people appreciated the show. It’s like somebody who existed in only one room for years. And then they opened the door and were like, wait, this is what happened.” After SCTV ended, Hollywood was waiting for them with open arms, and the stars moved en masse to L.A. and began their separate – but at times, overlapping – careers in TV, movies and on stage. Off-camera, they kept up traditions like gathering for a Christmas party at Marty and Nancy’s in L.A., and heading to Muskoka for summer cottage vacations (also at Marty and Nancy’s). Five decades later, they still see each other regularly, but, lately, it seems like they spend even more time talking about each other – in documentaries, at award ceremonies and on the phone to awestruck journalists. “I remember being backstage in a dressing room in Godspell and Andrea came in with her hair in curlers,” Short tells me, “She came into Victor Garber’s dressing room. Gilda and I were there, and Andrea was just so funny and then, as she left, she belched and turned it into, ‘You whore!’ And I remember Gilda saying, ‘Who does that?’ Well, um, no one does that. In the moment, Andrea is the funniest person you’ll ever meet.”
MIC DROP
“The last time I saw Catherine,” says Martin, of her friend Catherine O’Hara, who died in January, “we were being interviewed for the upcoming SCTV documentary together here in Toronto. It was so lovely because we reminisced a lot and talked about where we are now. I mean, we’ve kept in touch, of course. But talking about SCTV and how we became friends and how we met each other, I’m grateful that I had that time with her.” This cast has suffered its fair share of loss, starting with Candy in 1994, Ramis in 2014 and Flaherty in 2024. But this year, says Martin, “we’ve had an unnaturally tough time losing people.” She’s referring to Marty’s daughter, and her niece, Katherine Short, who died by suicide in February. “It’s been a very difficult time for sure, everything you can imagine it is.”
Martin was recently at a memorial for O’Hara, where she says, “Conan O’Brien spoke about how much SCTV meant to him and was extraordinarily funny and also heartbreakingly honest.” There, with fellow actors and filmmakers like Michael Keaton and Christopher Guest, Andrea was moved to see all the people that Catherine worked with and who loved her. And it got her thinking about her own mortality. “It’s hard not to do that at a certain age, to think: How many years do I have left and what can I contribute and what’s special to me? I think, I better not argue with my son because how many more years do I get to argue with him?” Martin’s two 40-something boys, Jack and Joe Dolman, were born in Canada during the SCTV years and recently the eldest was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound for the Wicked movies.
As she gets older, Martin has started to bristle at certain questions. Understandably, she’s still smarting from that time in a New York museum over a decade ago when a fellow patron asked her if she was Cher’s mother. (They are both Armenian, but c’mon, Cher is seven months older than Andrea.) And she can’t stand when people stop her on the street or turn to her in an elevator and ask, “Are you still working?” She was also miffed when I inquired about whether she still rides her bike around Toronto and New York. “I don’t want to be defensive,” she replies, “but I don’t think I’ve ever asked anybody, ‘Are you still doing something?’ But yes, I still am, thank god. I’m able to create when I’m riding my bike. I write a lot when I’m on my bike. And when I’m depressed or anxious, it really takes all that away. When I’m worried that I’m not as agile anymore, I get on the bike and that reconfirms that I am.”
Only six months from turning 80, Martin is more comfortable talking about the state of her insecurities than what she can or can’t do. “In the last year or two, I have been able to not worry as much because the closer you get to ‘dearly beloved,’ the more you ask yourself what does this even mean,” she says as she’s heading into the Hollywood Reporter Awards ceremony. “So if it’s important to you, then you do it. I had to stop thinking about what other people thought. And, honestly, it’s taken a long time but I can tell you I’m there now.”
Not long after that brief heart-to-heart, she’s onstage, picking up her award and schooling the audience with that Edith Prickley bravado: “All my life, I have barrelled through every stoplight / So sorry, baby starlets, I don’t wanna leave the spotlight / Give me love, give me the stage, give me the laughter / Give me the 32-ounce margarita after.”
And that, comedy fans, is as iconic as it gets.
