• Meryl Streep and Martin Short were photographed at an intimate London dinner, sitting side by side and leaning into each other.
• A fan who was seated nearby described their interaction as “full of laughs and tender gestures.”
• The sighting comes just days after a source claimed the couple’s connection had been strained following the death of Short’s daughter Katherine in February.
• Both stars are in London filming Only Murders in the Building Season 6, the show’s first season shot outside the U.S.
• Reps have long denied they’re a couple, but the evidence — and the fans — keep piling up.

Whatever the tabloids were saying about Meryl Streep and Martin Short, a candid photo from a London restaurant this weekend told a very different story.

A fan who stumbled into the same dining room as the pair on Sunday, May 17, posted a photo to X that immediately set the internet on fire. In it, Streep and Short — both 76 — are seated on the same side of the table, shoulders touching, both peering at something on her phone. Streep has her head tilted toward Short’s chest. It’s the kind of picture that doesn’t need a caption.

“Spending a few days in London, choosing a restaurant at random and ending up eating just a few meters from Meryl Streep and her husband,” the fan wrote on X — mistakenly calling Short Streep’s husband (Streep is single following her 2023 separation from Don Gummer, and Short has been a widower since his wife Nancy Dolman passed away in 2010). When someone asked if she’d gone over to say hello or snag a selfie, the fan shut that down immediately.

“No. They were having a great time. Full of laughs and tender gestures,” she wrote in a follow-up post. “No desire to impose myself in the middle of that.”

Honestly? Respect.

A Sighting That Comes at a Significant Moment

The timing of the photo matters. Just days before it surfaced, a source told RadarOnline.com that Short and Streep’s relationship had been under strain in the aftermath of a devastating loss — Short’s daughter Katherine died by suicide in February at age 42. “[Meryl] loves Martin unconditionally, and it’s just devastating to see him so broken,” the insider said. “They have never referred to each other as ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ per se, but they have been incredibly close.” The source added that “the hope is that once things start to calm down, they can find a way to reconnect.”

That London photo suggests the reconnection may already be underway.

Short has spoken publicly about Katherine’s death with remarkable openness. On a May episode of CBS News Sunday Morning, he drew a direct parallel to the loss of his wife. “Mental health and cancer, like my wife had, are both diseases,” he said. “Sometimes with diseases, they are terminal. My daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t.” He’s since become an advocate for mental health awareness through the organization Bring Change to Mind, calling for people to stop hiding from the word “suicide” and treat it as what it is — the possible final stage of an illness.

It’s been an unimaginable stretch of grief. And seeing him out, laughing, leaning close to someone who clearly cares about him — it means something.

The Romance That Dares Not Speak Its Name

The Streep-Short will-they-won’t-they has been one of pop culture’s most beloved slow burns. It started heating up in January 2024 when they sat together at the Golden Globes — a moment that famously caught Selena Gomez’s attention and set off a thousand memes. A rep quickly issued the standard denial: “They are just very good friends, nothing more.” Short himself doubled down on the Club Random podcast that same month: “We’re not a couple. We are just very close friends.”

Then came the hand-holding at the Only Murders in the Building Season 4 premiere party in August 2024. Then repeat dinners at Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica. Then a backstage photo at Tom Hanks’ play This World of Tomorrow, the two of them tucked in alongside Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield, Hanks and Rita Wilson. Then Amy Schumer, never one to stay quiet, told People in February 2025 after spotting them at SNL’s 50th anniversary: “I think that the tea is, I think Marty might be off the market. That’s what I’m seeing.”

Short has also been openly smitten in interviews — just never quite in the way that would make it official. During a June 2025 appearance on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, he admitted that working with Streep made him nervous in a way he hadn’t felt in years. “I remember the first day working with Meryl and driving to the studio and thinking, ‘I’m nervous today,'” he said. “I [hadn’t] been nervous going to the set for a long time.”

He went on to describe their very first scene together on Only Murders — a flirtatious piano moment — and how Streep, sensing his nerves, simply said in the holding area: “OK, nerves to half.” Short’s response: “Wait a second, I was nervous. You can’t be nervous.”

On the show, their characters got married. In real life, they keep showing up together in cities around the world. You do the math.

Season 6 Takes the Gang to London

There’s also a practical reason the two are in the same city right now. Only Murders in the Building is currently shooting its sixth season in London — the first time the Netflix series has filmed outside the United States. Steve Martin has been posting cheerful tourist content from the city, including shots at Trafalgar Square and a gift shop selling “London” beanies. The whole gang is there.

Streep joined the show as Loretta Durkin in Season 3, and she’s been a recurring presence since. Last month, she and Short reportedly floated the idea of a Broadway return together — which, if it happens, would give fans even more reason to obsess over their chemistry.

For now, their reps aren’t saying anything new. But a fan who randomly picked a London restaurant and ended up two tables away from Meryl Streep and Martin Short, watching them laugh and lean into each other all night, already said everything that needed to be said.

The post Meryl Streep & Martin Short’s London Date Has Fans Swooning appeared first on Cream.

• Netflix’s Marty, Life Is Short is directed by Lawrence Kasdan and now streaming
• Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Eugene Levy, and the late Catherine O’Hara all appear in the film
• The documentary covers Short’s decades of personal tragedy alongside his remarkable career
• Short estimates 80–98% of his career has been commercial failure — and doesn’t seem to mind
• The film ends with dedications to both O’Hara and Short’s daughter Katherine, who died earlier this year

The new Netflix documentary about Martin Short opens at a Boxing Day party in early-1990s California — a British Commonwealth holiday being celebrated in Hollywood, which feels exactly right for a man who has always seemed slightly out of place in the industry he’s conquered. Tom Hanks is there. Steve Martin. Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, fellow Canadians. The footage is warm and crackling and slightly chaotic, and it tells you everything you need to know about what Marty, Life Is Short is going to be.

The documentary, directed by Short’s longtime friend Lawrence Kasdan — the man behind The Big Chill and Raiders of the Lost Ark — began streaming Tuesday. At 101 minutes, it’s less a rigorous career retrospective than an affectionate portrait of a man who has turned the act of having a good time into something close to a life philosophy. And in doing so, it quietly answers the question that’s dogged Short for decades: why does he provoke such strong reactions, in both directions?

“Let’s say you’re going to host a dinner party and you invite Marty,” Steve Martin tells the camera, “then it turns out Marty can’t come? You cancel the party.”

The Case For (and Against) Martin Short

Short, now 76, has never been easy to categorize. He can’t do Eugene Levy’s understated deadpan. He can’t play it straight the way Catherine O’Hara could. He is — and this is both his gift and his problem — a lot. His comedy doesn’t ease its way in; it announces itself. Ed Grimley, the manchild with the gelled cone of hair. Jiminy Glick, the obnoxious entertainment journalist buried under latex and a fat suit. Characters so committed to their own bizarre logic that they either make you laugh immediately or make you want to leave the room.

A 2023 Slate piece by Dan Kois put words to what Short’s detractors have always felt — that his “manic, slightly creepy intensity” tips over into desperation, that the approval-seeking overwhelms the actual comedy. It prompted fierce pushback from fans and fellow celebrities alike. The documentary engages with that criticism directly, and it’s Jiminy Glick himself who delivers the sharpest response, appearing in character near the film’s end: “I don’t really find him very interesting. I find people who push too hard and are desperate for the approval without really presenting any reason for the approval — I find it offensive.”

“There’s basically three voices, two hairstyles, and four dance moves,” Glick adds. “And you can’t build an empire on that.”

It’s a genuinely clever move — using the most polarizing version of himself to disarm the criticism with the one weapon Short has always had: the joke.

Short is clear-eyed about his record. “I would say my career has been 80 percent failure,” he says at one point, later revising that upward to 90. John Mulaney, also appearing in the film, quotes Short’s own “98 percent” figure back at him. The flops are real: Pure Luck, Three Fugitives, Captain Ron, and the legendarily strange Clifford, in which Short played a 10-year-old boy and which Roger Ebert memorably described as “not bad in any usual way. It’s bad in a new way all its own.” Short calls himself “the cheap Amigo” from the 1986 film he made with Martin and Chevy Chase, and he says it with zero apparent bitterness.

The mantra he’s built around all of it: “98 percent of it is failure; nothing works and then something works.” And right now, something is very much working — Only Murders in the Building has made Short more beloved than ever, and his live comedy shows are selling out across the country.

A Life Built Around Loss

The documentary’s emotional weight comes from somewhere most viewers may not fully know about. Short grew up in Ontario as the youngest of five children in a family where making each other laugh was practically a competitive sport. “I profited from trickle-down comedy,” he says. But when Short was 12, his eldest brother David was killed in a car accident. A camp counselor delivered the news bluntly: “Your brother’s been in an accident and it killed him.” Short’s response, as he recalls it, was simply: “Is he OK?”

His mother died of cancer when he was 17. His father died roughly two years later from complications of a stroke. By 20, Short had lost his brother and both parents. He describes the aftermath as a choice: collapse and “become defeated forever,” or “learn that life is short and have a glass of wine and fun.”

He chose the wine.

The film also charts the love story at the center of his adult life — his marriage to Nancy Dolman, whom he met during a now-legendary 1972 Toronto production of Godspell that also starred Levy, Andrea Martin, Gilda Radner, and Victor Garber. (That production is apparently getting its own documentary, which, fair enough.) Short and Nancy were married in 1980. When they discovered they couldn’t have biological children — Nancy had endometriosis and the medications affected her badly — Short told her: “You have to stop those drugs, and we’re going to adopt a baby.” They adopted three: Katherine, Oliver, and Henry.

Nancy was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007. She died in 2010 at 58. The film handles her illness and death with real grace. Eugene Levy says that at a certain point, “we kind of knew it wasn’t going to work out.” Tom Hanks remembers the family’s attitude: “You’re not going to stop doing work because this malady is going to do its damage.” Andrea Martin says Nancy “wanted to keep going until she couldn’t,” and that Short “was a perfect partner because he let her. It was extraordinary to watch.”

Catherine O’Hara — who appears throughout the documentary and to whom the film is dedicated following her death in January — shared something quietly remarkable about Short and Nancy’s marriage. O’Hara revealed she was going through a rough patch with her own husband, production designer Bo Welch, and the two went to couples therapy. When the therapist asked them to name a couple whose relationship they’d want to emulate, they both immediately said Martin and Nancy. The therapist’s response: “I can’t tell you how many people have named them when I’ve asked this question.”

After Nancy’s death, Short coped the only way he knows how: he kept working. His son Oliver puts it simply in the film: “I don’t know what he would do if he wasn’t on the move.”

The Documentary Kasdan Wanted to Make

Kasdan’s approach here is worth noting, especially given the recent wave of comedy-icon docs — Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy, Gene Wilder, Mary Tyler Moore, Albert Brooks, and even Lorne Michaels. Kasdan isn’t making a career retrospective. He’s making something closer to a portrait of a friendship, and a philosophy.

Short jokes at the film’s opening that he’s worried Kasdan will make a hatchet job he’ll refuse to promote. But he’s also clearly delighted by the whole process — and not shy about poking fun at it. When Kasdan films him sipping coffee for B-roll, Short looks up and says, “We’re staging a breakfast I’ve already eaten,” then proceeds to take exaggerated bites of eggs and bacon. “Mmm! That’s so good!”

The home movie footage Kasdan has assembled is genuinely extraordinary — Short cavorting with Goldie Hawn and Sally Field, Steven Spielberg and Rita Wilson, at Christmas parties and summers at the Short family cabin in Ontario. There’s one clip where Short and Hanks recreate the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Spielberg behind the camcorder. These aren’t staged celebrity moments. They’re just people who really like each other, and Short is always at the center of it, making it happen.

“Marty operates at the speed of joy,” Hanks says.

The film doesn’t address Short’s rumored romance with Meryl Streep, and it doesn’t cover the death of his daughter Katherine, who died by suicide in February at 42. Short has spoken about it publicly since — telling CBS Sunday Morning, “My daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t.” But the documentary was already complete, and Kasdan closes instead with title cards: dedications to O’Hara and to Katherine. The whiplash of Glick’s jokes giving way to those two names is, quietly, the most affecting moment in the film.

“Marty is busier and more in demand now than he has ever been,” Hanks says near the end. “That is not coming out of a desire to stay on top or to fill his coffers or to stay relevant. Marty is doing it because the opportunity is there to have a blast.”

For a man who has lost as much as Martin Short has, that’s not a small thing.

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