Canadian actor and comedian Mike Myers was born in Scarborough, Ontario in 1963, the son of British immigrants. He has been a performer since the age of two, often acting in Canadian TV commercials (Gilda Radner, who had a Canadian boyfriend and moved to Toronto in the late 1960s, even played his mom in a BC Hydro ad when he was ten). Myers also acted in a lot of Canadian television shows, including a 1975 episode of the CBC sitcom King of Kensington, a 1979 episode of the CTV children’s adventure series The Littlest Hobo (a Lassie-style show about a heroic German Shepherd), the sketch comedy series Bizarre which aired from 1980 to 1986 on CTV (and on Showtime in the United States), and the Canadian variety show City Limits, which featured interviews, music and comedy. Mike Myers introduced a prototype version of his character Wayne Campbell on that show, before Myers brought him back for a segment on the 1987 CBC variety show It’s Only Rock & Roll called “Wayne’s Power Minute,” which was itself a prototype for “Wayne’s World.” Wayne even made an appearance in the music video for City Limits host Christopher Ward’s hit song “Boys and Girls.”

After high school, Mike Myers was accepted into Second City and began touring Canada doing improv, but he shortly thereafter moved to the United Kingdom and co-founded his own improv group called the Comedy Store Players, who were based at comedy club the Comedy Store in London. He acted a bit on British television while he was living in the UK, but he returned to Toronto and Second City in 1986 and got back to touring Canada, later transferring to the United States on Second City’s Chicago stage plus teaching and performing at Improv Olympic.

In 1989, Myers was hired as a cast member on the American variety series Saturday Night Live and became one of that show’s most popular performers thanks to his memorable oddball characters, including Wayne Campbell who Myers brought to SNL for the segment “Wayne’s World.” Other recurring Mike Myers sketches on SNL included German talk show parody “Sprockets,” “Lothar of the Hill People” featuring Myers as a prehistorical tribal chieftain, “Stuart Rankin, All Things Scottish” featuring Myers as a Scottish gift shop owner (“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!”), “Simon” starring Myers as a young British boy and BBC television star, “Coffee Talk” featuring Myers as talk show host and stereotypical middle-aged Jewish lady Richman (who was a take on Myers’ mother-in-law at the time and is constantly getting “verklempt”) and “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” alongside Chris Farley, Robert Smigel, Joe Mantegna and later George Wendt.

Mike Myers made his film debut when he and Dana Carvey reprised their roles as Wayne and Garth for the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, which was co-written by Myers and SNL writers Bonnie and Terry Turner and was produced by SNL creator Lorne Michaels. It received mostly positive reviews and became a huge hit, leading to the 1993 sequel Wayne’s World 2 which has the exact same writing team and was also a success, although slightly less so than the first film both critically and commercially.

That same year Myers starred in the romantic black comedy So I Married an Axe Murderer opposite Nancy Travis, who plays the butcher and possible serial killer who Myers falls in love with. It didn’t receive much positive attention at the time but it developed a cult following and Myers later spun it off into a 6-episode Netflix series called The Pentaverate in 2022. Just like in the 1993 film, Myers played several different characters in that show. And also just like the movie, the response from critics was not great.

Myers could have continued to make even more movies once he left SNL in 1995, but he took a four-year hiatus from the big screen after 1993. However, once he made his comeback in 1997, he would release one of his biggest hits: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, a spy satire which Myers both wrote and starred in, centered on a flamboyant and womanizing secret agent from the sixties who is cryogenically frozen and revived in the present day and teams up with Agent Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) to stop supervillain Dr. Evil, also played by Myers, from taking over the world (several SNL writers and performers claim Dr. Evil’s voice and mannerisms are based on Lorne Michaels). The film was successful enough at the box office that Myers would reprise both of his roles as Austin and Evil in the 1999 sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which co-starred Heather Graham as his new teammate CIA agent Felicity Shagswell and was an even bigger commercial hit, as well as in the 2002 sequel Austin Powers in Goldmember, co-starring Beyoncé Knowles in her feature film debut as Foxxy Cleopatra. Critics were pretty mixed on this trilogy but it struck a chord with a lot of viewers who found the films ridiculous in a good way.

Myers had another huge streak of success when he entered the world of animation, thanks to DreamWorks Animation’s fantasy comedy Shrek (2001) which satirized fairy tales in the same way that Austin Powers satirized the spy genre. Myers voiced the ogre with a heart of gold who befriends a donkey (Eddie Murphy), falls in love with a princess (Cameron Diaz) and battles an evil monarch (John Lithgow) and he immediately won over audiences with his Scottish accent and grouchy persona, once again penetrating the zeitgeist of pop culture in a huge way with one of his roles. Myers reprised the role in Shrek 2 (2004) and various sequels and specials that followed, including the upcoming Shrek 5.

His post-Austin Powers time as a leading man in live-action films on the other hand seems to have entered its twilight phase a long time ago. His career was definitely derailed by the negative reception of The Cat in the Hat (2003), which is not surprising given how adult-oriented that film was, but even The Love Guru (2008), which was a comedy specifically aimed at adults, did poorly with everyone who watched it. And he not only starred in that film but he also wrote and produced it, which I assume makes the public rejection sting a bit more. He tried his hand at directing documentaries when he made the 2013 film Supermensch about talent manager Shep Gordon, and he continues to act, making appearances in some high-profile films each decade like Inglourious Basterds (2009), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Amsterdam (2022). But for now he’s staying low-key and making occasional guest appearances on SNL. He might make a big comeback one day though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a fourth Austin Powers film given recent Hollywood trends.