Martindale was born in Jacksonville, Texas, the youngest of three children and only daughter of William Everett and Margaret (née Pruitt) Martindale.[5][6] In addition to owning and operating a lumber company in Jacksonville, her father was known as a champion dog handler in Texas and throughout the Southern United States.[citation needed]
Her oldest brother is the professional golfer and golf course designer Billy Martindale. The middle child, brother Bobby Tim, born 1946, died in 2004 at the age of 58.[5] Margo participated in golf, cheerleading and drama at school, and was crowned Football Sweetheart[7] and Miss Jacksonville High School 1969.[8]
After learning of the nomination, Martindale told CNN she hoped that it would open up more doors for older women in Hollywood. "People really identify with this character [Mags Bennett] and I think it's because it is a character that is powerful and older and extremely mean", she said.[17] She won Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series at the Critics' Choice Television Awards for her role as Mags Bennett.[18] In February 2012 it was announced Martindale had been cast in the ABC comedy pilot Counter Culture, which was not picked up.[19][20]
Martindale had a role in August: Osage County (2013), a film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts. She played Mattie Fae Aiken, the sister of lead character Violet Weston (Meryl Streep). Filming took place in the fall and winter of 2012.[21][22] Martindale returned to television in late January 2013 in the spy drama The Americans on FX Network. She played Claudia, the KGB "handler" of two Soviet spies living in 1980s Cold War America.[23]
She co-starred in the sitcom The Millers on CBS. In 2015, she began a recurring role as Ruth Eastman, Peter Florrick's new campaign manager on The Good Wife. Martindale took up the role of Ruth again in 2018 in season two of The Good Fight, the sequel to The Good Wife. She appears as a fictionalized version of herself on the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman. Her fictional version is easily angered and temperamentally violent, moonlighting as a bank robber and going on frequent criminal heists. BoJack consistently refers to her as "Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale", while most other characters begin addressing her with "Beloved."[24]
Martindale played Audrey Bernhardt, matriarch of the family on the Amazon series Sneaky Pete starring Giovanni Ribisi, for the 2015 pilot, the first season which aired in January 2017,[25] and the second and third seasons as well.[26] She also played Mike's Aunt Rosemary in two episodes of Mike & Molly. I Spy, a podcast hosted by Martindale and produced by Foreign Policy, was released in November 2019.[27]
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