Martin Short had seen more "death and tragedy" than any of his friends by the age of 20

He told The Hollywood Reporter: "All I know is that you only know your own life. At 20, I knew things about life and death and tragedy and loss that none of my friends knew about. I don't know why this didn't screw me up.

"The only thing I can think of is that these kind of life stresses either empower you or defeat you. But I think that by surviving all that and continuing on, I developed muscles to handle the disappointments in life.

"And I do think, in a weird way, it did make me braver as a performer, braver onstage. I'd try something, and if some people didn't like it, I didn't care because I didn't know them. I was never doing this for the admiration of strangers. I was doing this to make my siblings and my friends laugh."

The 'Only Murders in the Building' star tied the knot with Nancy Dolman in 1980 and went on to have Katherine, 40, Oliver, 38, and 35-year-old Henry with her but she passed away in 2010 following a long battle with cancer and even though it was an "absolutely horrible" time for the family, he has found comfort in a classic quote from author George Eliot.

He said: "It was absolutely horrible, obviously, and as sad as anything, but I will tell you what I said to my kids at the time: 'I believe Mom has zoomed into our souls', and I think... What's the George Eliot quote?

"I'm going to find it right now. It's worth it. George Eliot, let's see, I wrote it down somewhere. I have a thing where I keep a list of things that I forget, like people's names. Morgan Freeman was on it for a while. I'd be getting a massage and forget his name. Here it is. George Eliot said, 'Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them'.

" We were together for 36 years. I didn't want to forget Nancy.