Strother Martin Interview on “Slapshot” (April 9, 1977)

Slap Shot is a 1977 American sports comedy film directed by George Roy Hill, written by Nancy Dowd, and starring Paul Newman and Michael Ontkean. It depicts a minor league ice hockey team that resorts to violent play to gain popularity in a factory town in decline.

Strother Douglas Martin Jr. (March 26, 1919 – August 1, 1980) was an American character actor who often appeared in support of John Wayne and Paul Newman and in Western films directed by John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. Among Martin's memorable performances is his portrayal of the warden or "captain" of a state prison camp in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, in which he utters the line, "What we've got here is failure to communicate."[1] The line is number 11 on the American Film Institute list of 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes.

Early life[edit]
Martin was born March 26, 1919,[2] in Kokomo, Indiana to Ethel (née Dunlap) and Strother Douglas Martin.[3] For a short time, the Martins lived in San Antonio, Texas, but soon returned to Indiana. As a child, he excelled at swimming and diving. He was nicknamed "T-Bone Martin" because of his diving expertise. At 17 he won the National Junior Springboard Diving Championship. He served as a swimming instructor in the United States Navy during World War II and was a member of the diving team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He entered the adult National Springboard Diving competition in hopes of gaining a berth on the U.S. Olympic team, but finished third in the competition.[4].
In 1961, Martin portrayed Pete Gibson in the episode "The Case of the Brazen Bequest" on Perry Mason. In 1962, he was cast as Harold Horton in "The Chocolate Cake Caper" of the CBS sitcom, Pete and Gladys, starring Harry Morgan and Cara Williams. He guest-starred in Jack Lord's ABC adventure/drama series, Stoney Burke. In 1963, he was cast as Private Anton Copang in the episode "Walk Through the Badlands" of the ABC/Warner Brothers western series, The Dakotas. In 1966, Martin appeared twice as "Cousin Fletch" in the short-lived ABC comedy Western The Rounders, with Ron Hayes, Patrick Wayne, and Chill Wills.

In 1967, Martin played Arizona miner Ed Schieffelin in the episode "Silver Tombstone" of the syndicated television series Death Valley Days.[citation needed] Martin played villainous roles in many of the best-known Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s, including The Horse Soldiers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He played an Indian agent in the John Wayne film, McLintock! (1963) and a horse trader in the 1969 film, True Grit (1969).

By the late 1960s, Martin was almost as well-known a figure as many top-billed stars. In 1967, the same year as his role in Cool Hand Luke, he appeared in the episode "A Mighty Hunter Before the Lord" of NBC's The Road West series starring Barry Sullivan. In 1972, he appeared as James Garner's uncle in the "Zacharia" episode of NBC's Nichols. He also had a pronounced physical and vocal resemblance to playwright Tennessee Williams and occasionally parodied him, notably in the "Baby Fat" episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The play The Time of Your Life was revived on March 17, 1972, at the Huntington Hartford Theater in Los Angeles with Martin, Henry Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss, Gloria Grahame, Lewis J. Stadlen, Ron Thompson,[5] Jane Alexander, Richard X. Slattery, and Pepper Martin among the cast with Edwin Sherin directing.[6][7]

Martin appeared in all three of the classic Westerns released in 1969: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (as Coffer, a bloodthirsty bounty hunter), George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (as Percy Garris, the "colorful" Bolivian mine boss who hires the two title characters), and Henry Hathaway's True Grit (as Colonel Stonehill, a horse dealer). He frequently acted alongside L.Q. Jones, who in real life was one of his closest friends.
One of his last acting jobs was as host of Saturday Night Live on April 19, 1980. In one of the skits, Martin played the strict owner of a French language camp for children, based on his role as the prison captain from Cool Hand Luke. He even paraphrased his most famous line from the film, "What we have here is failure to communicate BILINGUALLY!" In another, he played a terminally ill man who videotaped his last will and testament. During his monologue, he again did his Tennessee Williams impression. That episode was supposed to be rerun during the summer of 1980, but it was pulled and replaced with another episode due to Martin's death.

Death[edit]
Martin was married to Helen Meisels-Martin from 1967 until his death; they had no children. In the last year of his life, Martin was under a doctor's care for cardiac problems. He died at age 61 of a heart attack on August 1, 1980,[10] at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California.