Mike Myers Born: Creator of Wayne, Austin, and Shrek

Mike Myers was a Saturday Night Live cast member who wrote and starred in three separate franchise films as different characters, each of which became a cultural touchstone of its era. Born on May 25, 1963, in Scarborough, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, he was the son of English immigrants and grew up absorbing British comedy. He started performing professionally as a child, appearing in Canadian television commercials, and joined the Second City comedy troupe in Toronto before moving to the Chicago Second City company. He joined Saturday Night Live in 1989 and quickly became one of the show's most popular cast members, creating characters including Dieter, the host of a German avant-garde television show, and Linda Richman, a Yiddish-accented talk show host. "Wayne's World," based on his SNL sketch, became a surprise hit in 1992, earning $183 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. The "Austin Powers" trilogy, released between 1997 and 2002, parodied James Bond films with a comedic precision that required encyclopedic knowledge of the source material. The first "Shrek" film in 2001 earned over $480 million worldwide and won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The franchise generated over $3.5 billion in total revenue across four films. Myers largely withdrew from public life in the 2010s after a series of films that underperformed commercially. He returned in 2022 with "The Pentaverate," a Netflix series in which he played multiple characters. He speaks in accents almost constantly during interviews, shifting between Scottish, English, and various character voices with a fluency that makes it genuinely unclear which voice is the original.