Born in Ilford, Essex, the son of Jack and Irene Buitenhuis, Martinus used his Rotterdam-born grandfather's middle name for his professional name.
[2] After national service in the Royal Air Force, he studied directing and acting at the University of Oklahoma and Yale School of Drama.
For the BBC he directed several Doctor Who serials, Galaxy 4 (1965),[3] Mission to the Unknown (1965), The Tenth Planet (1966),[2] The Evil of the Daleks (1967), and The Ice Warriors (also 1967).
He worked on classic serials too, What Maisie Knew (1968), The Black Tulip (1970), A Little Princess, (1973) and A Legacy (1975),[2] plus the dramatisation of a 1970s historical fiction best seller, Penmarric.
Among others: The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, Volpone by Ben Jonson, The Shoemaker's Holiday by Thomas Dekker, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (the version by Stephen Lowe) and Mad Forest by Caryl Churchill.
At the Gate Theatre London he directed the British premieres of some rarely performed Strindberg plays, translated from the Swedish by his wife Eivor.