A look into Martin Short’s family tragedies: daughter commits suicide

Martin’s mother, Olive, died when he was 17, after battling cancer for years. Two years later, his father died of complications from a stroke.

The losses left him an orphan before he turned twenty years old. Despite experiencing heartbreak in his younger years, he said the tragedy he experienced helped prepare him for greater challenges later in life.

“I think the reason I didn’t get pushed aside was because I had such a solid foundation,” he said The Guardian in 2012. “Situations like this are terrible, but I think you either gain strength from them or you become a victim.”

Martin added, “I remember talking to my friend, the satirist Stephen Colbert, a few days after a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he had gone very far with his material in front of George W. Bush, who didn’t find it funny at all.

“I said, ‘Weren’t you afraid?’ and he said, “When I was twelve, my father and two brothers died together in a plane crash. That day I was scared.” And when he told me that story, I thought, ‘I know from what you’re saying,’” he said.

In a separate interview with CNN in 2013, the Three Amigos actor opened up about how loss – at any age – makes people feel “strangely empowered.”

“You can go in a direction of, ‘I’m going to be a victim of this. I’m going to be a drunk. I’m going to do drugs. But you don’t know what I’ve been through.’ Or you become more resilient,” says Martin.

He told it too People that while it “sounds like a tragic family,” it “really isn’t.”

“My mother had cancer, she was sick and then in remission since I was 13. She was a remarkable person; my parents were too. So I never looked at it as if it was a tragedy — that I didn’t have them all my life,” Martin clarified. “You learn a sense of priorities. Our whole family has adopted the attitude that when you have wonderful moments, don’t doubt them, just enjoy them.”