BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Michael John Myers
Description: Actor, USA
Known For: Member of band – MING TEA.
Instruments: Guitar
Music Styles: Rock
Location: Canada
Date Born: 25th May 1963
Location Born: Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Mike Myers
Michael John “Mike” Myers (born May 25, 1963) is a Canadian actor, comedian, screenwriter, director, and film producer, who also holds British and American citizenship. He is known for his run as a featured performer on Saturday Night Live from 1989 to 1995, and for playing the title roles in the Wayne’s World, Austin Powers, and Shrek films. He also directed the documentary film Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, and had a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009.
Myers was born on May 25, 1963 in Scarborough, Ontario, the son of English-born parents Eric Myers (1922–1991), an insurance agent, and his wife, Alice E. Hind (born 1926), an office supervisor and a veteran of the Royal Air Force.
Both his parents were from Liverpool and he has two older brothers, Paul, an indie rock singer-songwriter, broadcaster and author, and Peter, a Sears Canada employee.
The family is of English, Scottish and Irish ancestry. Myers was raised Protestant.
Myers reportedly holds Canadian, U.S. and British citizenship.
He attended Sir John A. MacDonald Collegiate Institute in Scarborough and then graduated from Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute, also in Scarborough.
In 1986, Myers joined the Second City Theatre.
Career
Early career
Myers began performing in commercials at the age of two. At the age of ten, he made a commercial for British Columbia Hydro, with Gilda Radner playing his mother. A few months later, according to Myers, his brother was teasing him about his “girlfriend [Radner] being on some stupid show on Saturday”. Myers swore that one day he also would be on the same show, the then-fledgling Saturday Night Live. At the age of 12, he made a guest appearance as Ari on the TV series King of Kensington. Several years later, Myers named a character in his film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery Vanessa Kensington after the series.
Myers graduated from high school in 1982 and was immediately accepted into the Second City Canadian Touring Company, after which he moved to the United Kingdom where in 1985 he was one of the founding members of The Comedy Store Players, an improvisational group based at The Comedy Store in London.
The next year, he starred in the British children’s TV program Wide Awake Club, parodying the show’s normal exuberance with his own “Sound Asleep Club”, in partnership with Neil Mullarkey.
He returned to Toronto and Second City in 1986 as a cast member in the Second City’s Toronto main stage show. In 1988, he moved from Second City in Toronto to Chicago. In Chicago, he trained, performed, and taught at the Improv Olympic. He made numerous appearances, including as Wayne Campbell, on Toronto’s Citytv in the early 1980s, on the alternative video show City Limits hosted by Christopher Ward.
Myers also appeared as Wayne Campbell in the music video for Ward’s Canadian hit “Boys and Girls”. Later, Ward appeared as one of Austin Powers’ band members in Ming Tea in Myers’s popular movie series.
The Wayne Campbell character was featured extensively in the 1986 summer series It’s Only Rock & Roll, produced by Toronto’s Insight Production Company for CBC Television. Wayne appeared both in studio and in a series of location sketches directed and edited by Allan Novak. Myers wrote another sketch, Kurt and Dieter co-starring with Second City’s Dana Andersen and also directed by Novak, which would later turn into the popular “Sprockets” sketch on Saturday Night Live.
On July 3, 2011, Myers returned to The Comedy Store in London to reprise his role ‘for one night only’ with the improvisational troupe (The Comedy Store Players). The UK comedy website Chortle was full of glowing praise for Myers, claiming “Myers himself excelled and was strikingly adept and quick-witted, when his laughs came they were the biggest squeals of the night…this was no chore for Myers – being funny comes naturally to him – he could’ve spent the whole two hours farting the Canadian national anthem and the audience would’ve still lapped it up.”
Film
In 1992, Myers and Dana Carvey adapted Wayne’s World into a full-length motion picture based on the SNL sketch. It was among the most successful movies of the year and the following year a sequel was released—Wayne’s World 2. That year Myers also starred in So I Married an Axe Murderer, which garnered a cult following. The characters in the movie were based on people Myers knew growing up in the Bridlewood section of Scarborough. After Wayne’s World 2, Myers took a hiatus from television. Myers returned to acting in 1997 with the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, then a sequel in 1999, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, finally topping it off with Austin Powers in Goldmember in 2002.
Myers played both the title role (Austin Powers) and the villain (Dr. Evil), as well as other characters, in all three Austin Powers films. In 1998, he played one of his rare non-comedic roles in the film 54: Steve Rubell, proprietor of New York City’s famous Studio 54, a 1970s discotheque. The film was moderately successful, and Myers’s performance was widely praised. Myers later parodied the club as “Studio 69” in Goldmember.
In June 2000, Myers was sued by Universal Pictures for US$3.8 million for backing out of a contract to play Dieter, the SNL character, in a feature film. Myers said he refused to honor the US$20 million contract because he did not want to cheat moviegoers with an unacceptable script—one that he himself had written. Myers countersued, and a settlement was reached after several months where Myers agreed to make another film with Universal. That film was The Cat in the Hat, which was released in November 2003 and starred Myers as the title character. In 2001, Myers provided the voice of Shrek in the DreamWorks animated film of the same name, after original planned voice actor Chris Farley died in December 1997. In August 1998, he was given the role.
He reprised this role in Shrek 4-D (a theme park ride) in 2003, Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third, and the Christmas special Shrek The Halls, both in 2007. In 2009 he played the part of British general Ed Fenech, in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. In 2010 Myers returned for the latest film in the Shrek series, Shrek Forever After.
Myers made a cameo appearance in Britney Spears’ music video Boys as his film character Austin Powers. Myers is a member of the band Ming Tea along with The Bangles’ guitarist and vocalist Susanna Hoffs and musician Matthew Sweet. They performed the songs “BBC” and “Daddy Wasn’t There” from the Austin Powers movies.
In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian’s Comedian, he was voted among the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. During a CBS interview in 2007, he noted that he normally takes three years between films. He spends one year “living his life” and then writes various screenplays, develops characters, practices them in front of live audiences, and then selects one of the screenplays to film. Myers noted this was the Marx Brothers’ procedure for developing their film material.
Myers received the MTV Generation Award in June 2007, making him the second Canadian to win the award (following Jim Carrey in 2006), for bringing his unique style of comedy to small and big screens alike. His directorial debut, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, was selected to be screened in the Gala Presentation section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.
Personal life
Myers began dating actress and comedy writer Robin Ruzan in the late 1980s after meeting at a hockey game in Chicago, during which Myers caught a puck and used the incident as an icebreaker to strike up a conversation with Ruzan. The couple married on 22 May 1993, and Myers later referred to Ruzan as “his muse”. The couple filed for divorce in December 2005.
In 2006, café owner Kelly Tisdale confirmed reports that she and Myers were dating. Myers and Tisdale wed in New York in a secret ceremony in the fall of 2010. They have three children: son Spike Alan (b. 2011) and daughters, Sunday Molly (b. 2014) and Paulina Kathleen (b. 2015).
Myers is a Dungeons & Dragons player[18] and was one of several celebrities to have participated in the Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day in 2006.
He supports the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League. He named two characters in the first Austin Powers movie Commander Gilmour and General Borschevsky, after then-Maple Leafs players Doug Gilmour and Nikolai Borschevsky.
Myers has played for Hollywood United F.C., a celebrity soccer team. He played in the 2010 Soccer Aid for UNICEF UK football match, England vs. R.O.W (Rest of the World) and scored his penalty during a sudden death shootout after the game ended 2–2 (June 6, 2010). The Rest of the World team beat England for the first time since the tournament started. Myers is a fan of Liverpool F.C..
Films include
SHREK – 2004 – (Voice)
AUSTIN POWERS – 1997
WAYNES WORLD – 1993
WAYNES WORLD – 1992