Martin Short Links Katherine Short’s Death to Nancy Dolman
Martin Short linked nancy dolman to his daughter Katherine Short’s death in a May 15 interview, saying both losses sat in the same category for him: fatal disease. He said mental illness and cancer should not be treated as separate kinds of tragedy, and he described the grief as different because, in his words, “This is your child.”
May 15 Interview
“I don’t see any difference between mental illness as a disease and cancer as a disease,” Short said in the interview. He said Katherine Short died by suicide at 42, while Dolman died of ovarian cancer in 2010. He also recalled Dolman’s final words to him as, “Martin, let me go,” and said of his daughter, “Katherine was saying, ‘Dad, let me go.’”
The comparison is his most explicit public framing yet of two losses that had already shaped his family story. Short and Dolman shared three children, and the interview tied those private details directly to the way he is speaking about grief now, not as separate events but as overlapping injuries with the same endpoint.
May 10 on CBS Sunday Morning
Short first spoke publicly about Katherine Short’s death in an interview shared on May 10. Speaking with Tracy Smith, he said, “It’s been a nightmare for the family,” and added, “My daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health.” He also said, “Borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t.”
That earlier interview put the family’s loss on the record for the first time, and the May 15 remarks added his direct comparison to Nancy Dolman’s death. For readers tracking how public figures discuss suicide and illness, the shift is from announcement to interpretation: Short is now drawing the same line between mental illness and cancer that he says he lived through at home.
Three Children, One Family
Martin Short and Nancy Dolman had three children: Katherine, born Dec. 3, 1983; Oliver, born April 29, 1986; and Henry, born Aug. 4, 1989. Short said losing his daughter has been different in the way he processes grief, and he put it simply: “This is your child.”
In the same recollection, he said that when he arrived in Newport Beach, California, his two grandsons, ages five and four, told him, “Papa, Let’s play giant,” and his immediate reaction was, “Oh, that’s why. That’s why.” The remark leaves the story where it belongs: not in abstraction, but in a family still building routines around loss.
