Martin Short and Late Wife Nancy Dolman Adopted 3 Children: Get to Know Their Kids 

Hollywood funnyman Martin Short has had a career full of notable achievements both on stage and off. The Only Murders in the Building star is a loving father to his three children, Katherine, Oliver and Henry, whom he adopted with his late wife, Nany Dolman. 

Martin and Nancy met while performing during the Canadian run of Godspell in 1972, a musical that has been revived off-Broadway many times. The pair got married in 1980, just as Nancy began a recurring arc on the ABC sitcom Soap. Once the couple decided they wanted to expand their family, she took a step back from show business to focus on raising their kids. 

Katherine was born in 1983. Oliver arrived three years later. Their youngest child, Henry, was born in 1989. All three siblings attended red carpet events with their parents over the years. They grew extremely close and leaned on each other for support when Nancy died in 2010 at the age of 58. The actress was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three years earlier. 

“Before my wife, Nancy, died two years ago, we were together for 36 years, but I would have been divorced five times if I hadn’t found the right person,” the Emmy winner told The Guardian in October 2012. “I wouldn’t have faked it and played a game just because I didn’t want to be divorced. It’s been a tough two years for my children. This is the thing of life that we live in denial about, that it will ever happen to us or our loved ones and when it does you gain a little and you suffer a little. There’s no big surprise.”

After losing his wife, the Saturday Night Live alum shared that he still felt her spirit around him and their family. 

“She died in 2010, but I still communicate with her all the time. It’s ‘Hey, Nan,’ you know? How would she react to this decision or that, especially regarding our three kids,” he explained in a January 2019 interview with AARP. “I believe that when people die, they zoom into the people that love them.”

Martin also opened up more about his family and how they dealt with their grief in his 2014 memoir, I Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend.

“I didn’t want to feel like her death was something I needed to hide,” he told Vulture in February 2018. “I wanted to expose what I’ve experienced about grief and loss. I didn’t see how you could write a book about life and not include those things, because as much as we might wish they weren’t, they are a part of life.”

Keep scrolling to meet Martin’s three children with his late wife, Nancy.