Martin Short Opens Up on Daughter's Death, Frames Mental Illness as Disease

Martin Short sat down with CBS Sunday Morning on May 10 to speak about something he had kept private for months: the death of his daughter Katherine, who died by suicide in February at age 42. The 76-year-old actor and comedian, known for decades of laughter—from the wedding planner Franck in "Father of the Bride" to his recent work in the Emmy-winning "Only Murders in the Building"—chose to frame his family's devastation not as shame or mystery, but as the outcome of disease.

"It's been a nightmare for the family," Short said of Katherine's death. But he moved quickly past the wound itself to something he wanted the public to understand: that mental illness operates like any other terminal condition. "Mental health and cancer, like my wife's, are both diseases, and sometimes with diseases they are terminal," he explained. Katherine had struggled for years with extreme mental health challenges, including borderline personality disorder, he said. "She did the best she could until she couldn't."

Katherine died on February 23 at her residence in Los Angeles. The medical examiner determined the cause to be a gunshot wound to the head. She was the eldest of three children Short had adopted with his late wife Nancy Dolman, who died of ovarian cancer in 2010. Her two brothers, Oliver and Henry, survive her. At the time of her death, a family representative released a brief statement: Katherine was beloved and would be remembered for the light and joy she brought into the world. Short postponed dates on his comedy tour with Steve Martin to grieve.

What few outside the family knew was that Katherine had built a meaningful career in the field she understood intimately. She earned a degree in psychology from New York University and a master's in social work from USC, becoming a licensed clinical social worker in Los Angeles. She worked in private practice and in community mental health outreach—a life spent helping others navigate the very struggles that ultimately took her own.

Short's willingness to speak about Katherine's death sits within a longer pattern of his life. He has never hidden the private tragedies that shadowed his public success. His older brother David died in a car accident in 1962 when Martin was twelve. His mother Olive died of cancer in 1968. His father Charles died of a stroke two years later in 1970. His wife Nancy died in 2010. Now his daughter. These are not the losses of an ordinary life, and Short has chosen not to treat them as secrets.

In 2012, two years after Dolman's death, he told The Guardian that his children had endured a difficult stretch without their mother. "This is the thing of life that we live in denial about, that it will ever happen to us or our loved ones, and when it does you gain a little and you suffer a little," he said. "There's no big surprise." By 2019, speaking to AARP, he had developed a philosophy about grief that rejected the cultural impulse to move on and forget. "I still communicate with her all the time," he said of Nancy. "It's 'Hey, Nan,' you know?" He explained that he believed the dead remain present in those who loved them, and that speaking their names—refusing the silence that denial demands—was the only honest way to live with loss.

Short's public framing of Katherine's death as the outcome of disease, not failure or weakness, arrives at a moment when the conversation around mental health and suicide is slowly shifting. By naming borderline personality disorder, by comparing it to cancer, by saying his daughter fought and then could not fight anymore, he is offering a different story than the one shame tells. Whether that story reaches the people who need to hear it most—those in their own private nightmares, wondering if they too will reach a point where they cannot—remains to be seen.