Martin was disappointed that "Pennies" was a commercial flop. "I loved that movie so much. The most heartfelt thing I've ever done was 'Pennies From Heaven,'" he told Penthouse in 1984. Still, Martin plowed ahead to make innovative flicks like the 1982 noir pastiche "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" and "The Man With Two Brains" (1983), wherein Martin's character attempts to implant the disembodied gray matter of a sweet, intelligent young woman into the skull of the brazen and bitchy Kathleen Turner.

In 1984, Martin received high marks from critics for another mind-body switcheroo flick, "All of Me," costarring Lily Tomlin. On the set, Martin met and became enamored of British actress Victoria Tennant. The pair wed at Rome's City Hall in 1986. Considering Martin's success, money and fame, he could pretty well have had his pick of Hollywood after he and Peters parted ways. But Martin longed for substance over eye candy -- and that's what he saw in Tennant. No doubt her brains, refined breeding and British accent appealed to him.

Martin revealed as much in his 1991 romantic comedy "L.A. Story," his love letter to Los Angeles and Tennant after the manner of Woody Allen's Gotham-based "Annie Hall." Martin plays a parody of himself, a wacky TV meteorologist named Harris Telemacher, dying of cerebral thirst in the arid intellectual climate of Los Angeles. Along comes Tennant as limey Sara McDowel, who sweeps him off his roller skates. The parallels to Martin's own life are too close to be coincidence.

Tennant divorced Martin in 1994, and since then he's been paired with more than one Hollywood beauty, including Anne Heche and Helena Bonham Carter, but he hasn't remarried.

Martin has remained enormously prolific, doing almost a film a year since 1981, and sometimes more. Of these, a good many have been tepid Middle American fare such as "Mixed Nuts" (1994), "Parenthood" (1989) and "Father of the Bride" (1991). But to Martin's credit, there have been some gems, like his cameo in Frank Oz's "Little Shop of Horrors" (1986) or his leads in "Roxanne" (1987), "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" (1988), "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" (1987) and "Bowfinger" (1999).

Nor has Martin been wary of redefining himself and taking risks: for example, his venture into playwriting with the 1993 stage comedy "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," which New York magazine called a "very funny riff on the birth of the modern century." Other reviews were less kind to the production, which featured Einstein and Picasso meeting for a drink in 1904 at a Parisian cocktail bar. The New York Times said Martin's play "captures the inevitable way art and celebrity have merged," but chastened its shallowness. Still, "Picasso" had successful runs in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it enhanced Martin's image as a thoughtful manipulator of ideas.

He is at heart an intellectual and an aesthete. He's a longtime trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with a gallery named after him. And he possesses a highly regarded art collection made up predominantly of 20th century American painters such as Edward Hopper, Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn.

In addition, Martin has penned a number of short essays for the New Yorker and other publications. In 1998, he collected them all in a slim volume titled "Pure Drivel." The anorexic tome had critics gushing with superlatives. Now there's "Shopgirl," which novelist John Lanchester, writing for the New York Times Book Review, called an "elegant, bleak, desolatingly sad first novella."

The plot deals with the oft-visited theme of May-December romances, and one suspects that Martin is drawing on life experience here. The affair in question is between a 28-year-old clerk at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and a 50-ish Seattle computer magnate. There's nothing terribly original about the people or the story, but Martin crafts a convincing portrait of loneliness in his protagonist Mirabelle. Even Martin, now a wry, wise 55, seems to realize that his literary debut may never have occurred were it not for his name.

"There's nothing more embarrassing then being a celebrity novelist. You just don't want to hear that an actor has written a novel. It really smells," Martin admitted to the New York Times last October. Well, at least he's not coughing up "Steve Martin's Wild and Crazy Pasta Recipes," which probably would spend an equal amount of time on the bestseller list.

With Martin's Academy Awards gig this month and a dark comedy titled "Novocaine" due out later this year, featuring Martin as a dentist opposite Helena Bonham Carter, we can look forward to seeing more of him -- more of the mature, urbane version, that is. As long as he continues to take risks, at least some of what he produces will be exceptional. No one's perfect.

"I'll never run out of stuff," he told Penthouse in 1984. "Because there'll always be something to twist. As it's developed, my whole comedy personality is bent. It's tilted towards irony, like the bore at the party."

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