Biography - Sacha Baron Cohen

With the smash success of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”, Sacha Baron Cohen has finally lived up to all those Peter Sellers comparisons. The British funnyman, famous for his “Da Ali G Show” characters, has found international superstardom with “Borat”, which earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture and won Cohen a Globe trophy for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy).

Baron Cohen was born on October 13, 1971 to an Orthodox Jewish family in London, and grew up near Hertfordshire where he attended the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School. After spending a year in Israel, Baron Cohen attended Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied history. Though he performed on stage at Cambridge and was interested in comedy from a young age, Baron Cohen was unsure of his future and for a brief period considered a career in business which saw him work at investment firms JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. However, Sacha returned to performing in 1998, appearing as his future “Da Ali G Show” character Bruno in two-minute sketches on The Paramount Comedy Channel. Soon after, he debuted his Ali G alter ego for “The Eleven O’Clock Show” on Channel 4, which proved popular enough to launch “Da Ali G Show” in 2000.

Playing a moronic white gangsta-rapping ‘journalist’, Cohen’s headlining show became a huge success in the U.K., winning him a BAFTA award for Best Comedy Series and later an Emmy nomination for the show’s American incarnation in 2003. The show featured several sketches with Baron Cohen as Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, and Borat, his over-the-top and anti-Semitic Kazakh TV reporter. Primarily composed of interviews with celebrities and politicians, clips from the show have become YouTube favorites including his 2004 Harvard University commencement speech as Ali G.

Baron Cohen rarely appears out of character, and the massive promotional push for “Borat” saw him give countless interviews in which he offended Jews, women, homosexuals and a smattering of ethnic groups around the world. The character’s clueless and insensitive rantings have created enormous controversy – probably just what Cohen wants for a film meant to unearth the majority of people’s indifference to intolerance. The film’s pseudo-documentary style has led to several lawsuits, all of which brought by people who appeared in “Borat” and were subsequently humiliated by the ridiculous things they said or did on camera.

The uniquely talented comedian is on the verge of becoming a major movie star, after a well-received comic turn with Will Ferrell in “Talladega Nights” and the post-“Borat” announcement that he would be starring with Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s screen version of the dark musical “Sweeney Todd”. To top it off, 20th Century Fox has reportedly paid roughly $40 million for the rights to a movie version of his character Bruno.