Background

Ethnicity: Baron Cohen's maternal family were German Jews who moved to Israel. His paternal family were also Ashkenazi Jews, who moved to Pontypridd and London in the United Kingdom.

Sacha Baron Cohen was born on Oct. 13, 1971, in London, England. He was one of three sons in an upper middle class Jewish family. His mother, Daniella Naomi, who worked as a movement instructor, was born in Israel. His father, Gerald Baron Cohen, a clothing store owner, was born in London and raised in Wales.

Education

Baron Cohen first attended St Columba's College Prep School, St Albans, Hertfordshire, before moving on to attend Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School,a private school in Elstree, Hertfordshire, near London. He went on to the University of Cambridge, entering Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read history under Niall Ferguson and wrote his dissertation on Jewish involvement in the American Civil Rights movement, with emphasis on the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi.

During his time at Cambridge, he participated in a few productions of its famed Footlights theater troupe, which served as the amateur stage for Cambridge students not enrolled in a drama curriculum.

Career

After earning his degree, Baron Cohen worked briefly in investment banking before deciding to give himself five years to achieve success as a comedian and performer. He was already doing stand-up comedy - sometimes with his brother in skits where they dressed as rabbis and sang songs that poked fun at Jewish culture - and told himself that at the end of the five-year period he would opt for law school or another professional career if he had not yet achieved fame. His first television appearances came on a small cable network as the host of a youth program, but he also began honing various fictional personas that would evolve into Ali G, Borat, and Bruno, a campy Austrian fashion-television host.

Baron Cohen first appeared as Ali G in 1996, though the character did not have a name at the time, in some skits that he and a camera crew filmed for a comedy show on London Weekend Television. When Baron Cohen saw a group of kids skateboarding, he attempted to impress them with his own moves before attracting attention in a park by resurrecting his old breakdancing moves. At first, he was stunned when others assumed he and his antics were genuine. That first foray also included hopping aboard a tourist bus and providing his own commentary with the microphone, and getting thrown out of a corporate office building. The bits were brought back and edited as filler for the show, which aired live, but when the cue came for the second one, "there wasn't anything," Baron Cohen recalled in a 2004 interview with Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair. "I didn't understand it. Basically, what had happened was the head of the channel had said, 'We're pulling all of this.' Because he was scared of getting sued."

Realizing he had struck the equivalent of gold in the comedy business, Baron Cohen honed the Ali G character into a bling-encrusted, track-suit-wearing figure with comically mangled grammar and sentence syntax, and who may even be borderline illiterate. The break came with when he was hired by a new series, The 11 O'Clock Show, in 1998. It had a current-events-focused format not unlike that of Jon Stewart's Daily Show on Comedy Central in the United States, and the call in which he was offered it came just two months before his self-imposed five-year deadline was about to come due. On the show, Baron Cohen's Ali G character served as an interviewer of actual figures in British news, politics, and culture, and Baron Cohen's longtime friend from Cambridge and Haberdashers' Aske's, Dan Mazer, was one of the writers and producers. Mazer would serve in that dual role for several subsequent projects in Baron Cohen's career.

Those included Ali G's own series, Da Ali G Show, which began airing on Britain's Channel Four network in 2000. It quickly emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon in Britain, coining several catch-phrases and leading to a film version, 2002's Ali G Indahouse, in which the titular character is elected to the British House of Commons. There was also a book of Ali G wisdom, and even an appearance as the limousine driver in Madonna's video for "Music" in 2000. That video was Baron Cohen's first ex-posure to an American audience, but he was already working on episodes for a brand-new Ali G series to air on the United States television, partly because he had become so famous in Britain as the character that he was no longer able to hoodwink unsuspecting interview subjects into appearing on camera with him.

Da Ali G Show began airing on the premium cable channel HBO in early 2003, and for the first six episodes Baron Cohen and his producers had scored several notable guests. All were subjected to Ali G's absurd but utterly straight-faced questions: He asked former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali if Disneyland belonged to the United Nations, interviewed astronaut Buzz Aldrin and asked if the moon was real, and wondered aloud to former United States Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop why he could never remember his PIN number for automatic-teller banking, which prompted an increasingly peeved Koop to reply, "I can give you a quick answer and say you're stupid."

Getting his subjects to make such statements seemed to be Baron Cohen's most impressive talent as a comedian. The HBO version, which included another six episodes in 2004, also featured Borat Sagdiyev, the fictional United States correspondent for Kazakhstan television, and Bruno, a barely clothed, Mohawk-sporting gay fashion-television reporter with a deeply comic German accent. As Borat, Baron Cohen met with a men's group in the Deep South and asked them if they had slaves, to which they expressed some rue that the practice was now illegal. In a Bruno clip, he excitedly told his viewers that "Being gay is the new coolest thing, which is why I came to gayest part of America - Alabama!" At a college football game there, Bruno cheered alongside the pep squad, which prompted an ugly homophobic chant to erupt from the stands.

It was Borat, however, that became the subject of Baron Cohen's first Hollywood movie deal. Fox Searchlight signed him to expand Borat's on-the-road stories into a full-length, cross-country travelogue-mockumentary, but there were some issues with various names attached to direct it, and three weeks of footage shot in 2004 had to be shelved. Baron Cohen then convinced Larry Charles, a former writer for Seinfeld who had directed HBO's comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm, to come aboard, and the result was Borat, which became the number-one film at the United States box office for the first two weekends of November of 2006 when it opened.

Borat dominated entertainment-industry news as well as Internet and water-cooler chat during that same time frame, and earned a slew of surprisingly positive critical accolades as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay.

Baron Cohen promoted his film almost entirely in character, even refusing to launder the suit he wore as Borat in order to give off a somewhat offensive odor. He would likely smell much better during press interviews for the planned Bruno movie, for which he had reportedly received $42 million for the film rights - a figure Baron Cohen claimed was erroneous in the Rolling Stone interview. He was slated to appear in Sweeney Todd, the 2007 screen adaptation of the Broadway musical alongside Johnny Depp, who was cast as the murderous barber in nineteenth-century London. Baron Cohen has also appeared as a gay French race-car driver in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and in the animated Madagascar movie as the voice of Julien, king of the lemurs, a role he was set to reprise for the 2008 sequel.

Several year later Baron Cohen announced that he was permanently retiring Bruno, as he had previously done with Borat and Ali G. In 2011 he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s family-oriented fantasy Hugo as a self-important Parisian train station agent. For his next starring vehicle, The Dictator, Baron Cohen created a new comedic character - the despotic military ruler of a fictitious North African country. He subsequently portrayed the wicked Thénardier in a 2012 film adaptation of the musical Les Misérables.

Baron Cohen cowrote and starred in The Brothers Grimsby, a spy comedy in which he played the hapless brother of an assassin (Mark Strong), and he portrayed the villainous Time in Alice Through the Looking Glass. He then debuted the television series Who Is America? in 2018, once again creating several outlandish characters to interview unsuspecting politicians and celebrities to reveal their prejudices.

Achievements

• Sacha Baron Cohen is a well-known actor and comedian. He is known for creating and portraying many fictional satirical characters, including Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev, Brüno, Admiral General Aladeen, Erran Morad, and multiple others. Like his idol Peter Sellers, he adopts a variety of accents and guises for his characters and rarely appears out of character. In 2013, he received the BAFTA Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Ali G Indahouse

    (Ali G unwittingly becomes a pawn in the evil Chancellor's...)

    2002
  • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

    (Losing his confidence after a spectacular crash, a dimwit...)

    2006
  • Who Is America?

    ("Nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Variety Sketch Ser...)

    2018
  • Jolly Boys Last Stand 2000
  • Borat 2006
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street 2007
  • Bruno 2009
  • Hugo 2011
  • Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues 2013
  • Grimsby 2016
  • Alice Through the Looking Glass 2016
  • The Dictator 2012
  • Da Ali G Show 2000

Personality

Baron Cohen reportedly still follows the Sabbath prohibition against work whenever contractual obligations allow him to do so. He admitted that he was uneasy with having become a celebrity. "I think that essentially I'm a private person, and to reconcile that with being famous is a hard thing," he told Strauss in Rolling Stone. "So I've been trying to have my cake and eat it, too - to have my characters be famous yet still live a normal life where I'm not trapped by fame and recognizability."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Leonard Peikoff

• Sport & Clubs

  Football

• Athletes

  Novak Djokovic, Cristiano Ronaldo

• Music & Bands

  Rock

Connections

Baron Cohen first met actress Isla Fisher in 2002 at a party in Sydney, Australia. The couple became engaged in 2004. Subsequent to Fisher's conversion to Judaism, the two married on 15 March 2010 in Paris, France in a Jewish ceremony. Baron Cohen and Fisher have three children.

Father:

Gerald Baron Cohen

Mother:

Daniella Baron Cohen

Spouse:

Isla Fisher

Daughter:

Olive Baron Cohen

Daughter:

Elula Lottie Miriam Baron Cohen

Son:

Montgomery Moses Brian Baron Cohen

Friend:

Adam Sandler

Friend:

Jennifer Aniston

Friend:

Madonna Ciccone

References

• Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorized Biography
• The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle over Borat