Sacha Baron Cohen

Baron Cohen worked out his method early, on The 11 O'Clock Show and then Da Ali G Show: invent a character, put him in front of people who have no idea the character is fictional, and let their manners do the rest. Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev, Bruno Gehard and Admiral General Aladeen are all built the same way, and he has been described as a performance artist for good reason.

The skill is nerve. He holds a character long past the point where anyone else would break, and the comedy comes from what other people will agree to rather than from anything he says himself. Borat is the definitive demonstration, a film in which the joke is almost never on Borat. Bruno and the Borat sequel push the same device further, with diminishing returns and rising discomfort, and The Dictator abandons the ambush format for a conventional comedy that shows how much the format was doing.

His straight acting is better than the character work gets credit for. Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, the station inspector in Hugo, Thenardier in Les Miserables, and Abbie Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago 7, a real dramatic performance in a film full of them. He also carried a straight dramatic lead in the miniseries The Spy.

The other side of the ledger is family animation, which pays for all of it: King Julien across the Madagascar films, Uncle Ugo in Luca, Time in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Three Golden Globes and two British Academy Television Awards, plus Oscar and Emmy nominations, for a body of work most awards bodies struggle to categorise.