[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84th 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 19th 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?
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