Baron Cohen was born in 1971 into a middle-class Jewish family, one of three sons (one of his brothers wrote the music for Borat). His father runs a menswear shop and his maternal grandmother trained as a ballet dancer in Nazi Germany. She fled in 1936 to Israel, where she set up a fitness centre. “She was the last Jewish girl to be taught ballet in Germany,” says her grandson.

Religion is observed in the Baron Cohen family but does not dominate. “I wouldn’t say I am a religious Jew,” he told NPR. “I am proud of my Jewish identity and there are certain things I do and customs I keep.”

It’s what you might call Church of England Jewish: he tries to keep kosher and attends synagogue about twice a year. Where possible he goes home on Fridays to observe the Sabbath with his family. Not that he gets home very often. He lives in Los Angeles with his fiancée, the Australian actress Isla Fisher (perhaps best known as Shannon from Home and Away).

It was thanks to one Jewish tradition that he got his first taste of showbiz: his breakdancing group provided the entertainment at his bar mitzvah. “As a kid I was very into rap,” he told
Rolling Stone. “I used to breakdance. Starting at the age of 12 my mother would take me and my crew in the back of her Volvo. We had the linoleum in the back, and she’d drive us to Covent Garden in the dead middle of winter. We’d pull out the lino and start breaking.

“Essentially we were middle-class Jewish boys who were adopting this culture, which we thought was very cool. That was sort of the origins of Ali G.”