The only actor who left Martin Short starstruck: “Anyone else wouldn’t have mattered”
When you’ve been in show business for over half a century, you tend to become friends with a lot of very cool people, just like Martin Short.
The Canadian funnyman has mixed it up with several of the finest comedians across multiple generations, including his endearing friendship with Steve Martin to everyone that’s ever been a guest star on Only Murders in the Building (which is a lot of people), with his Christmas card list reading like a who’s who.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Short would have been influenced by several works now considered classics. He’s spoken about being a fan of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, and it turns out he’s also an admirer of a revered comedy, one that was released when he was just eight years old.
During an episode of Conan O’Brien’s podcast, the ¡Three Amigos! star joined the host in discussing times they were starstruck, with both comedians agreeing that the celebrities that had made the biggest impact on them were the ones they watched growing up. For O’Brien, it was Don Knotts, star of The Andy Griffith Show and Three’s Company, while for Short, he met one of his childhood heroes completely out of the blue.
“Christopher Guest and Jamie Lee Curtis are friends of mine,” he recalled, dropping names like they were burning coals, “She was having a birthday for her three-year-old daughter. So this is like, I don’t know, ’89 or something. And out of the kitchen comes Tony Curtis and he looks like Tony Curtis… My favorite film was Some Like It Hot… Anyone else wouldn’t have mattered. Tom Cruise? Wouldn’t have mattered. And I like Tom Cruise!”
Some Like It Hot is an adaptation of a French movie called Fanfare of Love, in which Curtis stars opposite Jack Lemmon as two Prohibition-era musicians who inadvertently become witnesses to a crime, and to escape from the gangsters pursuing them, disguise themselves as women. Things go according to plan, that is, until a beautiful singer, played by Marilyn Monroe, enters the scene and the pair fall for her immediately. It routinely appears in lists of the funniest films ever made, such that when the US Library of Congress began preserving films in 1989, Some Like It Hot was one of its first picks.
For those who don’t know, Tony Curtis is Jamie Lee Curtis’ father, making her a nepo baby on both sides, as her mother was the great Psycho star Janet Leigh.
Jamie had an interesting relationship with her famous dad, wherein, after her parents divorced when she was just four years old and her father became a distant figure in her life, they occasionally reunited, including once to do cocaine, before formally reconciling shortly before the Golden Age legend’s death in 2010.
Short and O’Brien are absolutely right, in that, even if our tastes change or the reputations of our faves falter over time, these stars are the ones that have shaped pivotal moments of our lives, and some of us are even lucky enough to meet them.
