Russell Brand

Russell Brand is an English comedian, actor, author, and political activist whose three-decade career has produced multiple defining English comedy roles — particularly his 2008 lead role in Nicholas Stoller's Forgetting Sarah Marshall and his 2007–2008 BBC Radio 2 talk-radio series The Russell Brand Show. He was born Russell Edward Brand on June 4, 1975, in Grays, Essex, England. His father Ronald Henry Brand was a London-area Bank of England photographer who abandoned the family in 1980, and his mother Barbara Elizabeth Nichols was a homemaker.

His education at the Drama Centre London (1995–1996; without earning a degree, after he was expelled for substance-abuse issues) launched his early-career path. His late-1990s and early-2000s English stand-up-comedy career across multiple London-area comedy clubs — complicated by his ongoing 1998–2003 heroin-and-cocaine addiction — produced his early-career English stand-up-comedy public profile.

His 2003 12-step rehabilitation under English actor and addiction-recovery sponsor Chip Somers launched his 2004–2007 English TV-and-radio comedy public profile. His 2006 BBC Radio 6 Music talk-radio series The Russell Brand Show and his subsequent 2007 transfer to BBC Radio 2 launched his late-2000s English radio-comedy public profile.

His October 18, 2008 "Sachsgate" controversy — when Brand and Jonathan Ross left several inappropriate voicemail messages on the answering machine of British actor Andrew Sachs (then 78 years old) on Brand's BBC Radio 2 show — shaped his later biographical narrative. The subsequent BBC investigation produced his October 29, 2008 BBC Radio 2 resignation. His 2008 American film breakthrough in Nicholas Stoller's Forgetting Sarah Marshall (in which he played English rock-and-roll singer Aldous Snow, alongside Jason Segel and Mila Kunis) — and his subsequent 2010 spin-off feature film Get Him to the Greek — produced his late-2000s American film public profile. His later biographical narrative across the 2020s has been complicated by 2023 multiple female-partner allegations of sexual assault and rape (which he has continued to deny). He married American singer Katy Perry in 2010 (divorced 2012), and has been with English-Italian author Laura Gallacher since 2017 (married 2017). The couple has two daughters.

His name Russell derives from the Old French roussel meaning "little red one." Russell has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since 1880.