- For a while he taught at Northwestern University and again directed opera.
- Magner enjoyed mountain climbing.
- Although Magner willed himself to live long, he was philosophical about death, telling The Times in 1995: "I like to think that something remains [after we die]--call it the soul, the spirit. If not, what are we all here for.
- After having to retire when he reached the age of 65, he moved to California and returned to theatre; he became the artistic director of the Inglewood Playhouse and started the New Theatre Inc. with Hope Summers.
- From 1933 till 1936 he worked in Vienna, in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), and in Prague, where he directed operas. During these years he won praise from George Bernard Shaw, who liked his production of his play Too True to Be Good enough to call Magner an exception to his rule that "Youth is wasted on the young", and Sigmund Freud, who offered to train him as a lay psychoanalyst on the strength of a play about a psychiatrist. He declined.
- As a director he often used multi-racial casts.
- He made a practice of celebrating his birthday by directing a challenging play: for his 98th, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Play Strindberg and for his 99th, the West Coast premiere of Thomas Hurlimann's The Envoy.
- In the 1940s he moved to radio and then in 1943 to television, working as a producer and director for 25 years, first for NBC and then from 1950 to 1965 for CBS in New York. His work included pioneering shows like Studio One, The Goldbergs, Lamp Unto My Feet, and Robert Montgomery Presents, and he hired a young Studs Terkel.
- Magner was a German-American theatre, radio, and television director.
- In 1936 Magner emigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where a Prague friend, Kurt Adler, was doing theatre work.
- Martin Magner directed innovative television such as "Studio One" when the medium was young, and opera and drama on stages from Nuremburg, Germany, to North Hollywood from 1929 to 1999.
- As a director he preferred classics such as Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Jean Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, Somerset Maugham's The Sacred Flame, and Athol Fugard's Blood Knot.
- The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle gave him a special award in 1975 and a lifetime achievement award in 1989.
- His father was a Lutheran director of a shipping line and his mother a Jewish concert pianist.
- He acted in the Hamburg Chamber Theatre from the age of 18 and replaced the general director of the company when he left for fear of the Nazis, despite his protest that he was himself Jewish. Four years later, on March 21, 1933, after being ordered to fire the company's remaining Jews, he fled to Vienna.
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