Mary Virginia Martin (December 1, 1913, Weatherford, Texas – November 3, 1990, Laguna Beach, California) was a Tony Award winning American star of (mainly stage) musicals. Among the roles she originated were Nellie Forbush in South Pacific and Maria in The Sound of Music. She was also a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1989.

Mary Martin (nee Mary Balmford) (born 16 January 1907, Folkestone; died 9 October 1969, London) was a British sculptor best known for her work with her husband Kenneth Martin.

Mary Blanford studied at Goldsmiths College, London in 1925–9 and at the Royal College of Art 1929–32 where she met and married Kenneth Martin in 1930. Exhibited at the A.I.A. from 1934, mainly as a still-life and landscape painter, using her maiden name, Mary Balmford. During the war Mary taught drawing, design and weaving at Chelmsford School of Art 1941–4 but gave this up when she became pregnant with her first child.

Along with her husband, Mary Martin moved towards pure abstraction in the late 1940s painting her first abstract picture in 1950, made her first reliefs in 1951 and her first free-standing construction in 1956. Kenneth and Mary collaborated on the Environment section of the seminal exhibition This Is Tomorrow. Mary Martin participated in group exhibitions of constructed art in England and abroad, notably Konkrete Kunst, Zürich 1960, and Experiment in Constructie, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1962. Martin designed a screen for the Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast (1957), reliefs for the Orient Line's S.S. Oriana (1960) and a wall construction for the University of Stirling.

Son is actor Larry Hagman.

Daughter, with Richard Halliday (I), Heller Halliday.

Was offered the role of Miss Ellie on "Dallas" (1978) when Barbara Bel Geddes left the show due to health problems. She turned it down. Had she accepted, she would have played the mother of JR Ewing, who was played by Martin's son, Larry Hagman.

Broadway stardom came with her support role in the musical "Leave It to Me" wherein she stopped the show with her mock striptease rendering of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" while posing on top of a large cabin trunk at a Siberian railway station. Paramount saw her in this and immediately signed her up for films.

Her father was a lawyer and her mother a violin instructor.

In 1982, Mary, friend and manager Ben Washer, actress Janet Gaynor (I) and Gaynor's husband, Paul Gregory (III), were riding in a taxi cab when a drunk driver named Bob Cato sped through a red light and smashed into their vehicle at the corner of Franklin and California Streets. The four were on their way to dinner in downtown San Francisco. Mary and Paul Gregory (III) suffered multiple injuries but recovered. Washer was killed. Ms. Gaynor subsequently died in 1984 from complications of her injuries.

Introduced the song "Speak Low" in her Broadway hit "One Touch of Venus."

Made her final appearance on the London stage in the 1980 Royal Variety Performance when she performed an engaging version of "Honeybun" from one of her biggest musicals "South Pacific."

Won a Peabody Award for her work in the television film Valentine (1979) (TV) in 1979.

The play "Kind Sir", in which Ms. Martin starred with Charles Boyer (I) on Broadway, was later made into the Cary Grant-Ingrid Bergman (I) movie Indiscreet (1958).

One of the few stars that legendary costume designer Edith Head disliked, or at least disliked working with. (The others were Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr and Claudette Colbert).

Won four Tony Awards: in 1948, a Special Award for the touring production of "Annie Get Your Gun," cited for "spreading theatre to the country while the original performs in New York;" and three Best Actress (Musical) awards: in 1950, for "South Pacific;" in 1955, for "Peter Pan," a part she recreated in several television versions; and, in 1960, for "The Sound of Music." She was also nominated as Best Actress (Musical) in 1967 for "I Do! I Do!"

Turned down the Broadway hits: "Oklahoma," "Kiss Me Kate," "My Fair Lady," "Funny Girl," and "Mame."

She lived in an apartment building called "Highland Towers" for a while in the late 1930s near the corner of Highland and Franklin Avenues in Hollywood, California. She would walk the 4 blocks to work as a singer at the "Cinegrill", a nightclub in the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard and walk back home again in the evenings. Both buildings, including the nightclub remain today.

Featured in a song by Canadian indie band The New Pornographers, which song creates a fictional TV program, "The Martin Martin Show," and then makes surreal references to it. Martin in fact never had a TV show called "The Mary Martin Show, although she did host a senior citizens' talk show for a few years in the 1980s.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 610-611. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.