Image Credit: MediaPunch/Shutterstock
Martin Scorsese is a man of many achievements: a celebrated auteur, producer of countless classics, and an Academy Award-winner. Besides his many accomplishments in the film world, Marty, 81, is also a proud father. The critically acclaimed director has been married five times, and he is a dad to three daughters, who are all grown up now.
During a February 2024 interview on SiriusXM’s This Life of Mine with James Corden, Martin opened up about welcoming his daughter Francesca, who is now 24, when he was in his 50s.
“It was extraordinary, and by that point, I was 56 and it was a different perspective on life,” Marty noted. “It suddenly became the most important thing, her and this little one that was coming. We didn’t know whether it was a girl or boy, and then, in the middle of the night, five weeks early, she came and I saw a lot of panicking and moving around.”
Each of Marty’s girls has pursued their own careers in the film industry and have been very active in the public eye. In fact, the director was recently introduced to a new audience when his youngest daughter went viral with him on TikTok. Get to know everything you need to about Martin’s three daughters here!
Cathy Scorsese
Francesca, Marty, and Cathy(Thenews2/NurPhoto/Shutterstock)
Martin married his first wife Laraine Marie Brennan in 1965, and they welcomed their first daughter Cathy, 58, in December of that year. She was named for the director’s mother. The Goodfellas director and his wife got divorced after six years of marriage in 1971.
When Cathy was still a teen, she made her acting debut in her dad’s 1982 film The King of Comedy as Dolores, and she made a later appearance in his 1995 classic Casino. In between those, her one other acting appearance was in 1994’s Men Lie.
It seems like Cathy has mostly stepped away from acting, but she’s remained in the film industry. She’s dabbled in producing a few projects, but she’s mostly worked in the art department with props, according to her IMDb. She did get to collaborate with her dad on a bunch of his hits, including Casino, The Aviator, Shutter Island, and The Departed. She’s also worked on other TV shows like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire.
Domenica Cameron-Scorsese
Cathy, Francesca, and Domenica. (Marechal Aurore/ABACA/Shutterstock)
A few years after Martin and Laraine’s divorce, he wed The Artist’s Way writer Julia Cameron in 1976. The pair’s marriage only lasted a year, but they did have their daughter Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, 47, in September 1976. With her parents being a writer and director, Domenica was practically fated to go into the arts herself. She followed in her dad’s footsteps and studied film at Wesleyan University, per IMDb.
Domenica made her acting debut in the 1988 TV movie Open Admissions, and she made appearances in movies made by both of her parents. She was in Julia’s 1989 film God’s Will, as well as Marty’s 1991 classic Cape Fear and 1993’s The Age of Innocence. She’s continued to act and even appeared in a few plays in the early aughts.
Outside of acting, Domenica has followed in her parents’ footsteps and tried her hand at producing a few short films, most of which she also directed. She also directed her first full-length film Almost Paris in 2016.
In 2011, Domenica tied the knot with Tony Frenzel in a ceremony in Chicago. Marty opened up about the experience in an interview at the time with The Hollywood Reporter. “It was very moving, but … she’s our little one,” he said. “I still can’t quite grasp it. This is very good for my daughter and everything; she married a sweet young gentleman. But it starts something new. Your concern is in a different way now for them. There’s not much you can do. You can help however you can, but you’re older, you’ll be dying. You’re not going to be around. And this is it.”
Francesca Scorsese
Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock
Martin married his fifth and current wife Helen Schermerhorn Morris in 1999, and they welcomed their daughter Francesca, 24, that same year. With her dad being an iconic filmmaker, she was surrounded by A-list celebrities as a kid, including going on playdates with Cate Blanchett’s kids, having Robert De Niro as a godfather, and calling Leonardo DiCaprio “Uncle Leo,” as she revealed in a 2020 USA Today interview. “It never felt like ‘Oh, my God, these are famous people and they’re here in my living room,’” she told the outlet. “It was just like: ‘This is Uncle Bob. This is Uncle Leo.’”
Like her sisters, she’s dipped her toes in acting, including cameos in her dad’s movies The Aviator, The Departed, and Hugo. She also appeared in her sister’s movie Almost Paris. She also starred in the series We Are Who We Are, per IMDb. She also studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She and Martin are also working on a book together for the popular film studio A24, and she said that they have a “top secret long-form project” in an interview with Nylon.
Besides her work in film, Francesca also helped introduce her dad to a whole new audience of younger fans by featuring him in her TikTok videos. She had her dad participate in tons of trends, including clips where he’d try to guess what different Gen Z slang terms meant, cute holiday videos, and doing movie brackets. “I love that [TikTok is] bringing younger audiences to my dad’s work,” she told Nylon. “They’re making him more relevant to an 11- or 12-year-old on the street.”
Marty recently opened up about starring in his daughter’s TikToks during a January 2024 appearance on The Late Show. “She would come over to me and say, ‘Dad, do this,” he said. “I had a beard and she said, ‘Just say this,’ and I said, ‘Would you leave me alone?’ So finally, I said it and it wound up in a TikTok of some kind and it went viral.”
He continued and revealed that he only learned when a friend told him that he knew about his beard. ” I remember an Indian filmmaker—a friend of mine—came into New York and wanted to say hello. I walked in the room and said, ‘I should tell you I have a beard,’ and he goes, ‘Oh no, we all know. It’s all over India,’” Marty said.
