Where Is Pamela Sue Martin Now?

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 9 min read

Pamela Sue Martin in 1977 as Nancy Drew. The actress who played television's most famous teen detective and Dynasty's Fallon Carrington now lives in Idaho, where she runs a theater company and writes.Photo: ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Start: From Hamburger Stand to Hollywood

Pamela Sue Martin was born on January 5, 1953, in Westport, Connecticut, and graduated in 1971 from Staples High School. Before fame, she was working in a hamburger stand for $1.45 an hour when a friend told her she was earning $60 an hour modeling in New York. Martin followed her friend's footsteps into teen modeling for print ads and television commercials, beginning at age 16. She had no training, no experience, and not even any particular ambition in the dramatic arts when she heard Columbia Pictures was auditioning girls for a film called To Find a Man. After three months of auditions, the producers cast her as the lead female character anyway.

Producer Irwin Allen saw her work in To Find a Man (1972) and chose her, at age 19, to appear in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the all-star disaster film that became one of the biggest hits of the decade. More films followed: Our Time (1974) with Parker Stevenson, Buster and Billie (1974), and The Lady in Red (1979). At her manager's insistence, she began working in television, and that decision would make her a star.

The Role: Nancy Drew, Teen Idol

Martin's work as ABC-TV's Nancy Drew made her something of a teen idol. The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries alternated each week between The Nancy Drew Mysteries and The Hardy Boys Mysteries, with Martin playing the famous girl detective across 24 episodes from 1977 to 1979. She was the definitive Nancy for a generation: smart, resourceful, and impossibly glamorous, solving mysteries in designer clothes with perfect hair.

But the show's format frustrated her. In season 2, the two shows were merged and renamed The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and Nancy's role was sharply reduced. Martin quit over the change; her final appearance as Nancy aired on January 1, 1978. She explained herself memorably in the July 1978 issue of Playboy, in a cover pictorial headlined TV's Nancy Drew Undraped, citing the merger as her reason for leaving. It was a bold move for a twenty-five-year-old actress: walking away from a hit show on principle, at the height of her teen-idol fame.

The Role: Fallon Carrington on Dynasty

Her second iconic role arrived in 1981, when ABC launched Dynasty, the primetime soap that would define 1980s excess. Martin was cast as Fallon Carrington Colby, the feisty, spoiled heiress daughter of oil magnate Blake Carrington. Across 88 episodes from 1981 to 1984, Fallon became one of the show's most beloved characters: sharp-tongued, vulnerable, endlessly watchable.

Martin won a Bambi Award for the role in 1984. Then, at the end of the fourth season, she left of her own accord, just as she had left Nancy Drew. The show wrote Fallon as missing and presumed dead, then recast the role with Emma Samms at the end of the fifth season in 1985. Martin's departure remains one of the great what-ifs of 1980s television: the original Fallon, gone at the height of the show's powers, by choice.

In between, she hosted Saturday Night Live on February 16, 1985, with musical guest The Power Station, cementing her status as a genuine star of the era. Her later screen work was sporadic: the films Torchlight (1985) and A Cry in the Wild (1990), television movies through the 1990s, a 2002 episode of That '70s Show, a 2006 episode of The L Word, the 2017 television movie My Christmas Prince, and finally the 2019 pilot of the Nancy Drew reboot, where she appeared as Harriet Grosset, a graceful passing of the torch to a new generation.

Idaho: The Theater Years

Martin's real second act has played out far from Hollywood, in Idaho. In the 2000s, she served as artistic director of the Interplanetary Theater Group, a theater company in the Sun Valley area. Local press covered the company's productions, including its staging of The Laramie Project, with Martin at the helm. It was community theater in the truest sense: serious work, local audiences, no cameras.

She has continued to run her own theater company and to write. The woman who once commanded primetime audiences of tens of millions now directs plays for a few hundred people in the mountains of Idaho, and by every indication she prefers it that way. The move mirrors the pattern of her whole career: she has always walked away from the biggest stage available to her, toward work that felt more meaningful.

The Personal Life: Four Marriages and Advocacy

Martin has been married four times: to Charles Gates (1975-1979), Jorge Brusch (1979-1980), Manuel Rojas (1982-1987), and Bruce Allen (1990-1998), with whom she has a son. She has spoken publicly about her struggle with interstitial cystitis, a painful bladder condition, becoming an advocate for awareness of the disease.

She has also been involved in environmental causes for decades. In 1984, at the height of her Dynasty fame, she appeared in a public service announcement to help save the pink dolphins of the Amazon River, directed by Clyde Lucas, who had appeared on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. In the early 1980s, her passions were scuba diving, tennis, and skiing; the throughline of her life has always been the natural world, not the entertainment industry.

Why She Keeps Leaving

There is a pattern to Pamela Sue Martin's career that is worth naming: she quits. She quit Nancy Drew over creative principle. She quit Dynasty at its peak. She quit Hollywood for Idaho. Each time, she left something most actors would kill for, and each time she seemed entirely at peace with the decision.

It suggests a person who never confused fame with happiness. The hamburger-stand girl who stumbled into stardom never quite believed the stardom was the point. The theater work in Idaho, the writing, the advocacy: these are the choices of someone who used fame as a means to build the life she actually wanted, then put fame down when it stopped serving that life. As of October 2026, at seventy-three, she appears to have succeeded.

Her Legacy

Pamela Sue Martin's legacy is twofold and both halves are iconic. As Nancy Drew, she defined the character for television and became a 1970s teen idol, the face of the girl detective for millions of young viewers. As Fallon Carrington, she created one of the definitive characters of 1980s primetime soap, winning a Bambi Award and leaving a role so indelible that the show spent years trying to replace her.

But perhaps her real legacy is the exits. In an industry built on clinging to relevance, Martin demonstrated, repeatedly, that it is possible to walk away: from a hit show, from a phenomenon, from Hollywood itself. She traded the soundstage for a theater in Idaho and never looked back. That takes a rarer kind of courage than any role she ever played.

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