Facts About Martha Stewart: Age, Career and Legacy

Here are the facts about Martha Stewart that matter most: she was born Martha Helen Kostyra in Jersey City, New Jersey, and as of 2026 she is 85. She turned a Connecticut catering business into one of the best-known lifestyle brands in America.

Quick facts

A Polish-American childhood

Stewart grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, the second of six children in a Polish-American household. She has often credited her parents, and particularly her father’s gardening, for her early interest in cooking, growing and making things by hand. She worked as a model as a teenager and paid her way through Barnard College, where she studied European and architectural history.

Wall Street, then Westport

Before she was a household name, Stewart worked as a stockbroker in the 1970s. She left finance after a few years and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where she started a catering company out of her basement. The business grew quickly on the strength of her high-end, handsomely presented food.

That led to her first book, Entertaining, in 1982, and a long run of titles that followed. She became a regular on television, appearing on morning shows and developing her own format.

Building a media company

In 1990 the magazine Martha Stewart Living launched, and the brand expanded into television, home goods, and merchandise. The company went public in 1999 as Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Years later, the company was sold to Sequential Brands, in a deal reported in 2015, although Stewart continued to be a public face of the business and a creative force.

Her partnership with Kmart and later Macy’s put branded linens, cookware and holiday decor in millions of homes. For many Americans, a Martha Stewart towel or baking dish was a first taste of a designer name at an everyday price, and that approach helped redefine how mass retailers sold home goods.

A setback and a comeback

Her career wasn’t without difficulty. In 2004 she was convicted in connection with a case involving the sale of ImClone stock, and she served five months in federal prison before finishing a period of home confinement. The episode was widely covered, and many predicted that her brand would never recover. Instead she returned to television and publishing in 2005 and went on to rebuild her profile with fresh shows and a new generation of fans. It is a significant part of her story because the comeback was so complete: she’d rarely been more visible than she was a decade later.

Reinventions

Stewart’s later chapters show a knack for reinvention. She teamed up with Snoop Dogg for the cooking competition series Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, an unlikely pairing that became a hit and led to further collaborations. In 2023 she appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue at 81, becoming the oldest cover model in the magazine’s history. A documentary about her life, released on Netflix in 2024, gave viewers a candid look at her career and her complicated public image.

She has also written dozens of books, including Martha Stewart’s Cooking School and a memoir-style volume about her own life, and she has been active on social media with a candid, humorous style that surprised long-time fans.

Personal life

Stewart married Andrew Stewart in 1961, and the pair divorced in 1990. She has a daughter, Alexis, who also works in media. Stewart splits her time between properties including her Bedford, New York, farm, where she has long grown produce and kept animals, and she regularly shares the results online.

What makes her story stand out

What distinguishes Stewart is that she professionalised domestic skill. Cooking, gardening and entertaining became a business and an aesthetic at a scale few had attempted. Whatever people think of the polish, her influence on how Americans decorate, bake and host is hard to deny.

What fans ask

The most common questions are about her age, her net worth and her secrets. At 85 she remains active in television and social media, and she has often said she plans to keep working. As for secrets, her advice is practical and repeatable: good ingredients, careful preparation and attention to detail. Her cookbooks and how-to articles are still popular because they lay out complex projects in step-by-step form. Readers who are new to her work often start with Entertaining, which shows how it all began.

Frequently asked questions