Martin Short spoke candidly on “CBS Sunday Mornings” about the many personal losses he’s experienced over the past four months, saying in his first interview since his daughter’s death that the recent events in his life have been “staggering.”
Katherine Short died February in her Hollywood Hills home at age 42 in an apparent suicide. Short was also very close friends with Diane Keaton, who died last October, Catherine O’Hara, who died in January and Rob and Michelle Reiner, who were killed in December.
Short has kept a low profile since Katherine’s death. His “CBS Sunday Mornings” interview comes two days before “Marty, Life Is Short” a new documentary about him, releases on Tuesday.
“If I wasn’t going to talk about this, then I would have pushed the documentary, because it is — listen, it’s called ‘Marty, Life Is Short,’” he said. “And suddenly, last October, I lost Diane Keaton on the same day I lost my sister-in-law, Nancy’s sister, to cancer. Then Rob and Michelle [Reiner, his wife] have been my lifelong friends for 40 years … And then Catherine O’Hara and then my daughter. I mean, it’s been in four months. Staggering.”
CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith asked Short, who lost both his parents before age 20 and also lost a brother when he was a child, copes with so much grief at once.
“You can’t. You just have to breathe in, breathe out. … It’s been a nightmare for the family,” he said. “But the understanding [is] that mental health and cancer, like [with] my wife, are both diseases — and sometimes with diseases they are terminal.”
“Marty, Life Is Short,” which is made from various sources including his own home videos taken over the years, heavily features footage his late wife, Nancy, or Nan, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010.
“My daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could, until she couldn’t,” Short said. “So Nan’s last words to me were, ‘Mart, let me go.’ And she was just saying, ‘Dad, let me go.’”
Watch the entire interview in the video above.
