July 31, 2024: Martin Sheen Studying: Estévez Legacies

[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84^th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]

On two important ways that Sheen’s birth and legal name have carried on.

As the great-grandchild of Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late 19^th century and almost certainly had their names changed (or at least significantly shortened) when they did so (although likely not on Ellis Island, despite the popular myth to the contrary), I’m very familiar with that longstanding and fraught tradition for American families and individuals whose names seem to put them outside the white (and all-too-often racist) mainstream. When he was trying to make it as a young actor, Ramón Estévez took part in that tradition (one that actors and other artists have often felt pressure to repeat), only professionally but still apparently painfully for his father. As he put it in his 2003 Inside the Actor’s Studio interview (and has repeated in other interviews since), “So I thought, I got enough problems trying to get an acting job, so I invented Martin Sheen. It's still Estévez officially. I never changed it officially. I never will. It's on my driver's license and passport and everything. I started using Sheen, I thought I'd give it a try, and before I knew it, I started making a living with it and then it was too late. In fact, one of my great regrets is that I didn't keep my name as it was given to me. I knew it bothered my dad.”

Talking openly about that choice and change in his later years is of course one way that Sheen has made sure to keep his birth (and again, legal) and father’s surname alive. But there are other important ways, and here I want to highlight two connected to his four children with his wife of more than 60 years, the actress Janet Templeton Sheen, all of whom are likewise artists and three of whom have used Estévez professionally (about the fourth, Charlie Sheen, the less said the better). By far the most well-known of those three is Emilio Estévez, the very prominent and successful 1980s actor who has gradually moved more fully into a directing career as well. Emilio’s career overall reflects a different emphasis on name and identity than his father’s, as the two discussed frankly and movingly in this interview. But I’d especially emphasize a film that Emilio wrote and produced as well as directed, The Way (2010), which stars his father as a doctor who walks the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route after the tragic death of his son. Given the relationship between that project’s writer-director and star, and the relationship of both of them to the Spanish immigrant Francisco Estévez, I’d say this film beautifully reflects and extends the family legacy on multiple levels (and Emilio has said the same).

The other such extension I want to highlight isn’t as specific nor as compelling as that one, to be clear. But I really like that the production company behind that film was Estévez Sheen Productions, a company created in 2002 by Sheen’s son Ramón Estévez (who has the same first and last names as his father, but a different middle name so he’s not a Jr.). And that company was behind another inspiringly multi-generational 2010 production, a staging of Frank Gilroy’s Pulitzer-winning play The Subject Was Roses (1964). Martin Sheen had co-starred in that play’s 1964 debut as the young character Timmy, and then received a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe nomination for his performance in the 1968 film adaptation. In the 2010 staging Martin Sheen played the father character, John, with his son and this version’s producer Ramón in attendance at the February debut. Both of these children seem determined to keep both their father’s and their family’s legacies alive in purposeful and thoughtful ways, and I have to believe that’s more meaningful to their grandfather’s memory than a surname.

Next SheenStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?