Mary Martin

Mary Martin 1913-90, American musical comedy star, b. Weatherford, Tex. From Martin's first stage appearance in Leave It to Me (1938), she starred in several enormously successful musicals, including One Touch of Venus (1943), South Pacific (1949); Peter Pan (1954), and The Sound of Music (1959). Her buoyant singing voice and high-spirited temperament won her widespread popularity. Her films included The Great Victor Herbert (1939) and, for television, Peter Pan and Annie Get Your Gun.

Martin, Mary (née Balmford) (1907–1969). British painter and maker of constructions, the wife of Kenneth Martin. She was born in Folkestone, Kent, and studied in London at Goldsmiths' College, 1925–9, and the Royal College of Art, 1929–32. Early in her career she painted landscapes and still-lifes in a style influenced by Post-Impressionism, but during the 1940s her work, like that of her husband, moved towards abstraction. She made her first purely abstract painting in 1950, her first geometric abstract relief in 1951, and her first free-standing construction in 1956. With her husband she was regarded as one of the leaders of Constructivism in England and she had numerous major commissions: among them were a screen for Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast (1957), reliefs for the liner SS Oriana (1960), and a wall construction for the University of Stirling (1969). In 1969 she was joint winner of the first prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. An Arts Council exhibition was devoted to her and her husband in 1970–1.

Martin, Mary (1913–90), American singer and actress, who first attracted attention in the Broadway musical Leave it to Me (1938), in which she sang ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, a song with which she was ever after associated. After several years in Hollywood she returned to Broadway in another musical, One Touch of Venus (1943), and made her first appearance in London at Drury Lane as Elena Salvador in Coward's Pacific 1860 (1946). After touring the United States in Annie Get Your Gun (1947–8), she created the role of Ensign Nellie Forbush in South Pacific (NY, 1949; London, 1951), and was then seen in her first non-singing role, in Krasna's Kind Sir (1953). She subsequently starred in a musical version of Barrie's Peter Pan (1954), and in a revival of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1955). In 1959 she created another famous role, Maria Rainer in the musical The Sound of Music, and in 1965 at Drury Lane she played Dolly Levi in another musical, Hello, Dolly! In the following year she starred on Broadway in I Do! I Do!, the musical version of Jan de Hartog's two-character play The Fourposter, which ran for over a year. After a year's tour, 1968–9, she virtually retired from the stage, though she was seen briefly in New York in 1978 in Arbuzov's Do You Turn Somersaults?