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Sheen’s Political Activism

Sheen’s Political Activism

Martin Sheen might be said to have political commitment in his blood, for his mother’s family was connected to the Irish Republican Army. His activism was first triggered in the mid-1960’s by César Chávez, who led the farmworker movement in California. Sheen has endorsed the civil rights group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) in its goal of forcing the state of California to honor the César Chávez holiday. A pacifist, Sheen is aligned with the Consistent Life Ethic, an organization that opposes capital punishment, war, and abortion. By 2010, Sheen had been arrested more than seventy times for his involvement in various protests and civil-disobedience actions (typically trespassing on military property).

As an off-screen narrator, Sheen has lent his rich baritone voice to numerous documentaries espousing political causes with which the actor has been associated, including In the Name of the People (1985), Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion (2002), and Return to El Salvador (2010). He has appeared as an interviewee in another series of politically committed documentaries, including SOA: Guns and Greed (2001) and On the Line: Dissent in an Age of Terrorism (2005). He played Judge Samuel Salus II in the experimental documentary In the King of Prussia (1983), in which director Emile de Antonio had members of an antiwar activist group play themselves (voicing their own statements from the trial transcript). Paradoxically, it is Sheen who is the most convincing.


See Also

Emilio Estevez

Raúl Juliá

Charlie Sheen

Jimmy Smits

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Martin Sheen

by Carolyn Anderson

American actor and activist

Sheen is an accomplished actor who has appeared in major roles in scores of feature films, documentaries, and television programs. Recognized for his portrayal of the fictional liberal president on the acclaimed television series The West Wing (1999-2006), Sheen is also known as a committed political activist.

Areas of achievement: Acting; radio and television; activism

Early Life

The actor known as Martin Sheen was born Ramón Antonio Gerard Estévez, the seventh of ten (surviving) children, of the immigrant couple Francisco Estévez and Mary Ann Phelan, who had met at a citizenship school in Dayton, Ohio. Estévez was originally from Spain, but he had entered the United States from Cuba, where he had worked for several years. Sheen had a difficult birth; the forceps used in his delivery broke bones in his left shoulder, which caused permanent damage in his left arm.

Martin Sheen.

324_Sheen_Martin.jpg

(AP Photo)

One of nine boys, Sheen grew up in the South Park neighborhood of Dayton, where his father worked as a machine inspector at the National Cash Register Company. The family had close ties to their Roman Catholic parish and local Catholic schools. From a young age, Sheen yearned to become an actor, despite his father’s objections. After graduating from Chaminade High School, Sheen borrowed money to journey to New York. The young would-be actor found that he did not fit the physical type that producers expected from his Latino name. He adopted the stage name Martin Sheen, in tribute to Archbishop Fulton Sheen, an influential Catholic theologian and television personality. It was a decision that disappointed the actor’s father and that Sheen later regretted, never changing his name legally and using his given name of Ramón Estévez on all identification and legal documents.

Sheen has described his first years in New York and meeting Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater as his university education. While supporting himself doing odd jobs, Sheen took acting lessons at the Living Theater and attended its diverse productions. Being in an environment rich in political and artistic ideas shaped the attitudes of the naïve midwesterner. After an eye-opening trip to Europe with the Living Theater, the young actor found occasional work in television series, such as The Defenders, Naked City, and Route 66, and steady employment on the soap opera As the World Turns. He made his Broadway debut in 1964 in a short-lived production of Never Live over a Pretzel Factory.?

Life’s Work

Sheen’s breakthrough as an actor came when he was cast as a returning veteran, the son, in a three-person Broadway drama set in 1946, The Subject Was Roses (1964). The play won a Pulitzer Prize for its author, Frank Gilroy, and a Tony nomination for Sheen, who again played Timmy Cleary in a 1968 film version. Several small film roles followed, and then Sheen costarred in That Certain Summer (1972), a made-for-television film. The Emmy Award-winning drama portrayed a homosexual couple sympathetically, a rare and controversial stance for the time. Like many actors of his generation, James Dean was an icon to Sheen, who played a Dean look-alike in Terrence Malick’s brilliant debut film Badlands (1973). As the banal yet personable serial killer Kit Carruthers, Sheen is remarkable, creating a complex character, full of vigor and unpredictability. Decades later, the actor and many critics still consider it Sheen’s best performance. A powerful portrayal of a World War II solider who was executed for desertion in the television docudrama The Execution of Private Slovik (1974) won Sheen a Emmy nomination, but it was as Captain Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now (1979) that Sheen achieved worldwide notoriety. In this famously difficult production, set during the Vietnam War, Sheen plays an assassin sent by the U.S. military to kill a rogue Green Beret colonel. Willard’s journey into Cambodia becomes a metaphor for entry into the darkness of the human soul. Sheen suffered a life-threatening heart attack while filming; during his convalescence his brother Joe Estévez became his stand-in. The experience changed Sheen, who had been drinking heavily and using drugs. He returned to work a more disciplined actor and a more committed pacifist.

The hard-working, versatile Sheen has appeared in scores of films, sometimes as many as nine released in a single year (1995). In 1974, he played Robert Kennedy in the docudrama The Missiles of October and would subsequently appear in many fictional films and docudramas set in political contexts: as John Kennedy in the television miniseries Kennedy: The Presidential Years (1983); as the narrator in JFK (1991); as Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg; as the chief of staff in The American President (1994); as a wealthy contributor in his son Emilio Estevez’s Bobby (2006); and, memorably, as Josiah Bartlet, the liberal, strong-willed Yankee president in the television series The West Wing. Over seven award-winning seasons, Sheen became so associated with the part of the admirable president that he was often urged to run for public office.

Amid the turbulence of a demanding acting schedule and the risks of his involvement in protests, Sheen has maintained a long and stable marriage. He and art student Janet Templeton married in 1961; they had three sons and a daughter, all of them actors, the most well-known of whom are Emilio Estevez and Carlos (who goes by the stage name Charlie Sheen). Martin Sheen has played the fictional father of his sons numerous times, pairing with Charlie in two episodes of the television series Spin City and in the films Wall Street (1987), Hot Shots Part Deux (1993), and No Code of Conduct (1998) and with Emilio in In the Custody of Strangers (1982) and The War at Home (1995).

In the mid-1980’s, Sheen formed a production company and began directing, starting with an award-winning Columbia Broadcasting Service After-school Special. He has returned to his first love, the theater, on rare occasions, including for a limited run in London in The Normal Heart (1987) and as the father in a 2010 revival of The Subject Was Roses, the play for which he received his first national fame forty-five years before, when playing the son.

Significance

In a career that has included major roles in scores of theatrical films, dozens of made-for-television films, a cluster of important documentaries, a long-running and critically acclaimed series, and occasional theater appearances, Sheen has established himself as a actor of technical skill with considerable audience appeal. From early parts that emphasized his youthful charm and rebellious attitude to portrayals of mature men, often with great responsibilities, Sheen has earned a reputation as a versatile and creative performer and has won numerous acting awards.

His off-screen life has been one of political activism, often to the point of arrest for civil disobedience. Frequently Sheen combines his political commitments with his acting skills, serving as an off-screen narrator in documentaries that support causes to which the actor is committed. More than any other American performer of his generation, Sheen has demonstrated the possibility of having a commercially viable acting career in the midst of a robust, sometimes confrontational, political life.

Further Reading

1 

Coppola, Eleanor. Notes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Director Francis Ford Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s thirty-two-month diary of the tumultuous creation of Apocalypse Now. Charts how the exhausting production changed its participants, including Sheen.

2 

Gilroy, Frank D. About Those Roses: Or, How Not to Do a Play and Succeed. New York: Random House, 1965. Playwright’s nineteenth-month diary provides a production history of The Subject Was Roses. Notes reveal Sheen’s working style and responsiveness to direction. Includes text of play and reviews from New York dailies praising Sheen’s performance.

3 

Orosco, José-Antonio. César Chávez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. A thoughtful study of the man and the philosophy that have greatly influenced Sheen’s political life.

4 

Oumano, Ellen. “Martin Sheen.” In Movies for a Desert Isle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Sheen’s recollections on his early career, influences on his work, and thoughts on the responsibilities of actors.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Anderson, Carolyn. "Martin Sheen." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240057601001.
APA 7th
Anderson, C. (2012). Martin Sheen. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Anderson, Carolyn. "Martin Sheen." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.