At the famous Kennedy Center Honors in the US on Sunday night, the British actor Sacha Baron Cohen, reprising his role as Borat, stole the show by targeting former president Donald Trump, rapper Kanye West, and antisemitism.

President Joe Biden grinned widely, and his wife Jill was giggling uncontrollably as Cohen cracked crude jokes in the witty Kazakh television journalist Borat Sagdiyev’s accent.

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Borat said to an audience including politicians and celebrities “I know the president of the US and A is here”. “Where are you, Mr. Trump?” “You don’t look so good. Where has your glorious big belly gone? And your pretty orange skin has become pale.”

Who is Sacha Baron Cohen?

Sacha Noam Baron Cohen is an English actor, comedian, producer, and screenwriter.  He was born on October 13, 1971,   in the Hammersmith area of London. 

Before attending the elite Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree, Hertfordshire, Baron Cohen received his education at the independent Catholic St Columba’s College in St Albans, Hertfordshire.  At Christ’s College in Cambridge, he continued his study of history with specialization on anti-Semitism, earning an upper-second-class honors degree in 1993.  He participated in the Labour Zionist youth organisation Habonim Dror and the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, where he acted in productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Cyrano de Bergerac.

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Career 

Baron Cohen made his television debut on Fanfare for Young Musicians and he also worked as a fashion model simultaneously. He began co-hosting a program on Windsor cable television’s local broadcasts in the early 1990s with Carol Kirkwood, who later worked as a BBC weather forecaster.

Channel 4 issued an open appeal for new television presenters in 1995 as it prepared to replace its popular program The Word. A producer was interested in a recording Baron Cohen, where he played the fake Albanian television reporter Kristo, who later evolved into the Kazakh Borat Sagdiyev. Baron Cohen also hosted Pump TV from 1995 to 1996.

In 1996, Baron Cohen began presenting the youth chat programme F2F for Granada Talk TV and had a small role in an advertisement for McCain Microchips. 

In the fifth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Baron Cohen appeared as a guide to Heaven alongside Dustin Hoffman. Additionally, he gave the voice to King Julien, the ruler of the ring-tailed lemurs in the Madagascar television series from DreamWorks Animation. He portrayed Jean Girard, the French Formula One speed demon, in the popular Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006).

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Baron Cohen has also presented at the MTV Europe Music Awards twice, first as Ali G on 8 November 2001, in Frankfurt, Germany, and then as Borat on 3 November 2005 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Recently in 2020, he portrayed political activist/anarchist Abbie Hoffman in the drama The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Baron Cohen married Australian actor Isla Fisher in 2004.  The couple has three children.