After graduating from the Putney School and Columbia University, where his roommate was Brian De Palma,[2][3] he spent a summer apprenticing with Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park.

Leaving his newspaper job, Martin joined a summer stock theatre company in Cape May, New Jersey; then spent a season with Boston Classical Repertory, and eventually rejoined Papp at his new Public Theater in Manhattan.

During the period from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, he was a common presence in episodic television, with guest roles in such popular fare as The Partridge Family, Dan August, The Bold Ones, Toma, Shaft, Get Christie Love, The Rookies, Switch, Logan's Run, The Six Million Dollar Man, Project UFO, The Waltons, a two-part episode of the Lynda Carter series Wonder Woman, CHiPs, Hart to Hart, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Fantasy Island, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Knight Rider, Airwolf, The Love Boat, Magnum, P.I., Hotel, Hunter, Silk Stalkings, Columbo and L.A. Law.

[4]: 1152 He continued to act in off-Broadway productions and made an unreleased film that caught the eye of a casting director at Columbia Pictures.

In 1994, entrepreneur Jeffrey Seder asked Martin to direct In Deeper, a feature-length docudrama that celebrated crime-fighting local citizens, as part of then-Mayor Ed Rendell's Heroes of the Streets campaign in Philadelphia.