Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner was born in 1944 in Long Beach, California, into a family with a long evangelical heritage. The name “Marjoe” is a portmanteau of the biblical names “Mary” and “Joseph”. His father, Vernon Robert Gortner, was a third-generation Christian evangelical minister who preached at revivals. His mother Marge, who has been labelled as “exuberant,” was the person who introduced him as a preacher, and is notable for his success as a child. Vernon noticed his son’s talent for mimicry and his fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed that the boy had received a vision from God during a bath, and he started preaching. Marjoe later said this was a fictional story that his parents forced him to repeat. He claimed they compelled him to do this by using mock-drowning episodes; they did not beat him as they did not want to leave bruises that might be noticed during his many public appearances.

In 1971, Gortner married Agnes Benjamin, who had appeared in his documentary. From 1978 to December 14, 1979, Gortner was married to actress Candy Clark. Until 2009, Gortner produced Celebrity Sports Invitational charity golf tournaments and ski events to raise money for charities such as the Dream Foundation and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance, retiring in January 2010.

He began his acting career with a featured role in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, the 1973 pilot for the Kojak TV series. In 1974, he made several appearances in film and television. In the disaster film, Earthquake, he was Sgt. Jody Joad, a psychotic grocery manager-turned-National Guardsman, the main antagonist. He starred in the television movies The Gun and the Pulpit and Pray for the Wildcats, and appeared in an episode of Nakia, a 1974 police drama on ABC.

In 2007, the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival commissioned actor and writer Brian Osborne to write a one-man play about Gortner. The play, The Word, premiered at the Festival with Suli Holum as director and main collaborator. In 2010, the play was recreated as The Word: A House Party for Jesus, with director Whit MacLaughlin. The new play opened October 14, 2010, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and has since been performed in New York (the Soho Playhouse), Los Angeles, Philadelphia (the 2011 NET Festival), and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (the Kelly Strayhorn Theater), with other productions planned for Austin, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

In 2008, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in Melbourne, Australia held the first retrospective of the cinematic works of Marjoe Gortner as part of their ninth festival.