Martin Sheen

• 1. Introduction

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  Martin Sheen was born Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez. In a 2009 speech at Oxford University, he said he had been arrested 66 times.

  The human rights activist Craig Kielburger gave that tally a memorable comparison. He said Sheen had "a rap sheet almost as long as his list of film credits."

  Those film credits are substantial. His work spans more than six decades of television and film, and he has worked with directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Yet in 2025, The Independent ranked him the greatest actor never nominated for an Academy Award.

  How does an actor end up with a borrowed name, a long career playing men of power, and an arrest record to match? Why did he keep refusing invitations to hold real office? And what drives a man who says acting is only what he does for a living?

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• 2. A Borrowed Name

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  In a 2003 interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Sheen described calling about jobs and apartments under his birth name. He said that "there was always that hesitation and when I'd get there, it was always gone."

  So he invented a new name from two borrowed ones. Robert Dale Martin was the CBS casting director who gave him his first big break. Fulton J. Sheen was a Catholic archbishop and broadcaster.

  The change never became legal. Estevez is still the name on his driver's license and passport, and he has said he never will change it officially.

  Popular culture noticed the double identity. The animated Nickelodeon franchise The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron features a character named Sheen Estevez, which joins his original surname with his working one.

  Sheen has been candid about the cost. "One of my great regrets is that I didn't keep my name as it was given to me," he said. "I knew it bothered my dad."

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• 3. Dayton and Bermuda

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  Francisco Estévez Martínez was born in Salceda de Caselas, in Galicia, Spain, and moved to Dayton, Ohio, in the 1930s. He worked there as a factory worker and machinery inspector at the National Cash Register Company.

  His wife, Mary-Ann, came from Borrisokane in County Tipperary, Ireland. Their seventh child was born in Dayton on the 3rd of August 1940. He was one of ten children, nine boys and a girl.

  The birth was hard. Forceps crushed his left arm, leaving it about 3 inches shorter than the right and limiting its lateral movement. The condition is known as Erb's palsy.

  The family home was on Brown Street, in Dayton's South Park neighborhood. Because of the father's work, the family also lived for a time on the island of Bermuda, on St. John's Road in Pembroke Parish. Five of Sheen's brothers were born there, and he was the first child born in Dayton after the family returned.

  His mother's brother, Michael Phelan, fought in the Irish Civil War as a volunteer in the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army. He was imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.

  Polio struck Sheen as a child and kept him bedridden for a year. His doctor used the method of Sister Kenny, and it helped him regain the use of his legs.

  When Sheen was ten, his mother died. The children faced the possibility of an orphanage or foster homes, but Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dayton helped, and the family stayed together. He went on to graduate from Chaminade High School, now Chaminade Julienne Catholic High School.

  At fourteen, while working at a private golf club in Dayton, he organized a strike of the golf caddies. His complaint was about the members. "They often used obscene language in front of us... we were little boys and they were abusive... anti-Semitic.... And they, for the most part, were upstanding members of the community."

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• 4. Stage and Conscience

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  With money borrowed from a Catholic priest, Sheen moved to New York City in his early twenties. His father opposed the plan. Sheen also deliberately failed the entrance examination for the University of Dayton so that nothing would pull him toward college instead.

  In New York he spent two years in the Living Theatre company. There he met the Catholic activist Dorothy Day. Working with her Catholic Worker Movement, he began a lasting commitment to social justice. Decades later he played Peter Maurin, the movement's cofounder, in Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story.

  The actor James Dean shaped Sheen's idea of the craft. "All of his movies had a profound effect on my life, in my work and all of my generation," Sheen said. "He transcended cinema acting. It was no longer acting, it was human behavior."

  Screen work began in 1963 with "Nightmare," an episode of the science fiction series The Outer Limits. In 1964 he co-starred in the Broadway play The Subject Was Roses. That breakthrough earned him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. He reprised the role in the 1968 film and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

  In 1966 he appeared in Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, a television adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real. Jack Landau directed it, and NET, a predecessor of PBS, presented it.

  In 1968 Sheen played the title role in Hamlet, directed by Joseph Papp at The Public Theater. The production used mostly English, with some Spanish dialogue for Hamlet's alter ego.

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• 5. The Jungle Shoots

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  In 1973 Sheen played Kit Carruthers, an antisocial multiple murderer, opposite Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick's crime drama Badlands. The performance won him the Best Actor award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. He has called it one of his two favorite roles.

  In 1974 he played Private Eddie Slovik in the television film The Execution of Private Slovik. The film was based on a World War II incident and told the story of the only U.S. soldier executed for desertion since the American Civil War. Sheen received an Emmy nomination for the part.

  In 1976 he took a darker turn in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. He played Frank Hallet, the son of a landlady, played by Alexis Smith, and an antagonist with bad intentions toward the teenager Rynn Jacobs, played by Jodie Foster.

  Francis Ford Coppola then cast Sheen as U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard in Apocalypse Now, released in 1979. Filming took place in the Philippine jungle during the typhoon season of 1976. Sheen later said that he was in poor physical condition and drinking heavily.

  The film opens with Willard drunk in a Saigon hotel room. Sheen did not have to pretend. He was celebrating his 36th birthday on set that day and was actually drunk.

  Twelve months into filming, Sheen had a minor heart attack and crawled out to a road to find help. His younger brother Joe Estevez stood in for him in a number of long shots and some of the voice-overs. Sheen resumed filming a few weeks later. The role brought him wide recognition and a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

  Years afterward, Sheen reprised the Apocalypse Now role in a cameo in the comedy Hot Shots! Part Deux, alongside his son Charlie Sheen.

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• 6. Presidents and Others

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  Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Sheen was a busy television guest star. His credits include My Three Sons in 1964, Flipper in 1967, Mission: Impossible in 1969, Hawaii Five-O in 1970, and Columbo and The Streets of San Francisco in 1973. He also played Danny Morgan in a recurring role on Mod Squad in 1970-1971.

  In 1972 he co-starred in the Emmy Award-winning television film That Certain Summer. It is said to be the first television movie in America to portray homosexuality in a sympathetic light.

  Historical figures became a specialty. He played Robert F. Kennedy in The Missiles of October in 1974 and White House Counsel John Dean in the miniseries Blind Ambition in 1979. In the miniseries Kennedy in 1983, he played John F. Kennedy, earning nominations for a British Academy Television Award and a Golden Globe.

  In 1991 he narrated Oliver Stone's film JFK. In 1993 his sympathetic portrayal of General Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg met with acclaim. He also played the sinister would-be president Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone and White House Chief of Staff A.J. McInnerney in The American President.

  Then came the role of a lifetime. From 1999 to 2006, Sheen played the fictional Democratic president Josiah "Jed" Bartlet in the NBC drama The West Wing. The performance won him a Golden Globe in 2000 and two Screen Actors Guild awards. It also brought six Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, tying the record for most nominations in that category without a win. In several episodes he is seen drinking from a "Dayton Flyers" coffee mug, a nod to the University of Dayton.

  His only Emmy came earlier, for a guest role in the sitcom Murphy Brown in 1994. He later earned another guest nomination for Two and a Half Men in 2005.

  The work kept widening. During the West Wing years he played Roger Strong in Catch Me If You Can and Captain Oliver Queenan in The Departed. Later he voiced the Illusive Man in the video games Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. In November 2010 he was cast as Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man.

  From 2015 to 2022 he played Robert Hanson in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie. In 2021 he appeared as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in Judas and the Black Messiah, a film about the death of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago on the 4th of December 1969.

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• 7. Arrests and Causes

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  In the spring of 1989, Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu, California. He promptly decreed the area a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame. Some residents were angered, and the Malibu Chamber of Commerce met that June to consider revoking his title. It voted unanimously to let him keep it.

  His activism began long before that. In 1965 he supported the farm worker movement led by Cesar Chavez in Delano, California. He has credited the Marianists at the University of Dayton and Archbishop Desmond Tutu as major influences, even though he never attended college in his youth.

  The protests took many forms. In 1988 he was arrested outside the Israeli Defense Ministry offices in New York during a 30-minute rally against America's military alliance with Israel. On the 16th of May 1995, Canadian sealers confronted him and Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson in a hotel on the Magdalen Islands. Sheen negotiated with the sealers while police escorted Watson to the airport. Sea Shepherd later named a ship after him.

  On the 1st of April 2007, he was arrested with 38 other activists for trespassing at the Nevada Test Site, during an event protesting against the site.

  Politicians kept asking him to join them. In 2006, Ohio Democrats reportedly urged him to run for the United States Senate. He declined. "I'm just not qualified," he said. "You're mistaking celebrity for credibility." On another occasion he said, "You can't have a pacifist in the White House."

  Opposition to the Iraq War drew him to the page and the field. In early 2003 he signed the "Not in My Name" declaration, which appeared in The Nation. On the 28th of August 2005, he visited Camp Casey to pray with the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan. He told her supporters, "At least you've got the acting president of the United States," a joke about his television role.

  Youth audiences became a platform too. In 2010 he spoke to 18,000 young student activists at Free The Children's We Day. "While acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive," he told them.

  On the 5th of December 2011, he visited Sing Sing Correctional Facility to meet Jon-Adrian Velazquez, who had been convicted of a 1998 murder and was serving a sentence of 25 years to life. That day Sheen held a press conference at a Manhattan courthouse, calling the case one that "cries out for justice." In March 2012 he joined George Clooney in the staged play 8, a reenactment of the trial that overturned California's Prop 8, playing the attorney Theodore Olson.

  A chance meeting on a pilgrimage route had lasting results. In 2009, while walking the Camino de Santiago, Sheen met Gary and Elizabeth Jewson of Australia, whose 18-year-old daughter Melanie had died in a car accident in 2004. Sheen became a patron of the foundation they launched in 2012. It has since raised more than A$250,000 for health and education services in Vanuatu.

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• 8. Family and Faith

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  On the 23rd of December 1961, Sheen married Janet Templeton. They have three sons and a daughter, Emilio, Ramón, Carlos and Renée, and all four became actors. Carlos changed his name to Charlie Sheen.

  The family has worked together often. Sheen played the father of Emilio in The Way and the father of Charlie in Wall Street and in Anger Management. He starred in Bobby, directed by Emilio. Renée played a White House staff secretary on The West Wing, and Emilio appeared uncredited in home-movie footage as young Bartlet's stand-in for his father's character.

  Sheen has directed just one film, Cadence in 1990, in which he appears with his sons Charlie and Ramón. He and Ramón later joined their real and stage names to create the production company Estevez Sheen Productions.

  The Way, released in 2010 and written and directed by Emilio, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sheen plays an American doctor whose son dies while hiking the Camino de Santiago. The father carries his son's ashes along the 800 km pilgrimage from the French Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela.

  That same year he filmed Stella Days in County Tipperary, near his mother's birthplace. He played the parish priest Daniel Barry, whose love of movies leads him to help build a cinema in Borrisokane.

  Sheen became a grandfather at 43, when Emilio had a son. He now has ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. In 2012 he appeared on the American version of Who Do You Think You Are? to trace his Irish and Galician ancestry. In December 2015 he underwent a quadruple heart bypass operation.

  After The West Wing ended, he turned to a long-delayed ambition. He had received an honorary arts doctorate from the National University of Ireland, and on the 1st of September 2006 he was among the first to register as a student at NUI Galway. He studied English literature, philosophy and oceanography. He joked that he would be the "oldest undergraduate" there. His friendship there with fellow alumnus Michael D. Higgins later led him to back Higgins in the 2011 Irish presidential election.

  In Paris in 1981, conversations with Terrence Malick, the director of Badlands, restored his Catholic faith. In a 2023 interview he said he loved the sacraments, and that when he returned to them, "I found myself." In 2008 the University of Notre Dame awarded him the Laetare Medal, the highest honor bestowed on American Catholics.

  In October 2025, he launched a podcast with his daughter Renée.

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