Mary Martello

Mary Martello was born and raised in Lansing Michigan, where she began performing on local television at the age of seven, under the guidance of local teachers David and Evie Machtel. As a teenager she studied at Lansing Community College as a voice major and in 1973 switched to theatre after meeting John Peakes and Richard Thomson. She became an apprentice, and then an actor at Peakes’ and Thomson’s BoarsHead Theatre, doing everything from Shakespeare to original plays and musicals - even while raising two young children.

In her twenties she remarried, and she and her family moved to Virginia, where she performed at the Barksdale Dinner Theatre, Theatre IV and Virginia Museum Theatre.

By the 1980s Mary was living in central New Jersey, which allowed her to work in New York at Light Opera of Manhattan, the Public Theatre and a variety of off-off Broadway shows. As her reputation grew in Colorado at the Denver Center Theatre, and in New Jersey at Foundation Theatre, Passage Theatre and seven seasons at McCarter Theatre in Princeton under the leadership of Nagle Jackson.
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Since the mid-1990s, Ms. Martello has been a leading actress and leading light of the Philadelphia non-profit theater world. She has played everything from Lady Macbeth to Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd to Mama Rose in Gypsy, as well as Lady Bracknell, Miss Hannigan, Queen Gertrude . . and an astounding variety of theatrical nuns from Sister Aloyisius in Doubt to the Mother Abbess in Sister Act.

Over these past three decades, she has appeared with the Arden, Azuka, InterAct, Lantern, Peoples Light, the Prince, the Walnut, the Wilma, Act II Playhouse and 1812 Productions. Mary has received five Barrymore awards for her acting, and has been a Barrymore nominee on eight other occasions, as well as acting as the Hostess of the Barrymore Ceremony. She has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and was recipient of a Lunt/Fontanne Fellowship . . . . . . Mary continues to act, and has lately branched out into writing and directing.