In Hollywood terms, that’s as sexy as it gets.Myers comes from a decidedly unarousing background. He was born on 25 May 1963 in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, where his parents had emigrated from Liverpool. Eric Myers had been an army cook, and in Canada worked as an encyclopedia salesman. He met Alice, Mike’s mother, at an amateur dramatics society – she had previously studied acting at Lamda, a drama school in London, with the intention of going into the theatre Her ambitions found an outlet in Mike.

From an early age he was taken to auditions and appeared in television commercials, including one in which the comedian Gilda Radner played his mother; he adored her, and has said that seeing her in the American comedy show Saturday Night Live sparked in him the ambition to be on the show, too.But the most important influence on his comedy was his father, who would ban from the house friends who did not make him laugh and wake his children late at night to watch British comedy on television “We watched all the great shows,” Myers has said. “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, On the Buses, The Goodies and Monty Python.” The anglophile streak in Myers’s humour is obvious in Austin Powers, with its homages to Carnaby Street; perhaps, too, it can be seen in his obsession with farting and willy jokes.There doesn’t ever seem to have been much doubt that he would be a professional comic. On the day of his final high-school exam, he auditioned for and was accepted by Canada’s celebrated comedy troupe Second City (it’s hard to think of a British equivalent of this: perhaps becoming a regular on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue). He stayed there on and off for the next eight years, the off-periods including a spell over here, working in double-act with the improvising comic Neil Mullarkey. His big break came in 1988, when he was accepted as part of Saturday Night Live’s stable of performers and writers, a year before Radner died of cancer.At Saturday Night Live he rose through the ranks by creating a roster of engaging characters: Dieter, an anal-retentive, black-clad German TV host, touchy about people messing with his beloved pet monkey; Simon, a little English boy who recounted innocent fantasies from his bathtub; and Wayne Campbell, a nerdish heavy-metal fan with his own cable TV show.In 1991, Wayne’s popularity led to Myers’s first cinema outing, Wayne’s World. Although the film was patchy and shapeless, it did well at the box office, thanks largely to Myers’s outstanding gift for inventing catch-phrases – “Party on!” “Excellent!” and “We are not worthy” in this instance; “Oh, behave” and “Shagadelic” in the Austin Powers films.In retrospect, it also signalled Myers’s conviction of his own physical unattractiveness.

Central to the comedy was the absurdity of the notion that a geek like Wayne could bag a babe like Tia Carrere: a key scene showed him winning her over by clowning around in his Y-fronts – his silliness being, the viewer is given to understand, irresistible. The scene is repeated, with different jokes and more clothes, in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – here, Austin wins over the gorgeous Liz Hurley by standing behind a sofa and doing an impression of a man going down an escalator.Myers’s one major venture in straight drama, 54, made in 1998, relied on a similar gap between his character’s self-image and his actual appearance. He played Steve Rubell, the founder of Studio 54, the club that was the high temple of disco in the late Seventies, where nobody could enter who didn’t have the look. The fact that Rubell himself was nothing much to look at gave the film its principal irony. Although 54 did badly, both critically and financially, Myers’s performance earned praise.Even in the animated comedy Shrek, in which Myers didn’t appear on screen at all, he still managed to play the ugly one. The film revolves around the ogre Shrek’s love for the beautiful Princess Fiona, and his conviction that she can never love somebody as revolting as him.Shrek was another big box-office success for Myers, though only after some heartache. After filming had finished, Myers decided that the voice he had used for Shrek wasn’t funny enough and insisted on revoicing all his dialogue with a Scottish accent – a decision that cost the studio an extra $4m.