Early Life
Donovan was born Martin P. Smith in Reseda, California to an Irish American middle-class family. He and his three siblings were raised Catholic. He graduated from Crespi Carmelite High School and attended Pierce College for two years. He attended American Theater Arts, a combined conservatory and theater company in Los Angeles, where he appeared in the plays Richard's Cork Leg by Brendan Behan and Private Life of the Master Race by Bertold Brecht.
In 1983, he and his wife moved to New York City, where he took odd jobs like installing drapery to support his family. He joined the Cucaracha Theater on Greenwich Street.
Read more about this topic: Martin Donovan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)