[4] He was born as Emmanuel Alhandu Martins at Okesuna Street,[5] Lagos, Nigeria, to a civil servant father with roots in Brazil and a Nigerian mother.

[7] In the 1930s he went into acting on the London stage, playing Boukman in Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, a 1936 drama by C. L. R. James that starred African-American actor Paul Robeson,[8] with whom Martins had featured in the 1935 film Sanders of the River.

'"[10] He appears in the 1949 film The Hasty Heart (starring Ronald Reagan and Patricia Neal), playing the African soldier Blossom, which role Martins also undertook in the stage production.

[6] He subsequently took roles in such films as Killers of Kilimanjaro (1960), Call Me Bwana (1963), Mister Moses (1965), and Kongi's Harvest (1970, Wole Soyinka's adaptation of his play of the same name).

[7] He is the subject of a 1983 book by Takiu Folami, entitled Orlando Martins, the Legend: an intimate biography of the first world acclaimed African film actor.