Di origine irlandese, è cresciuto in una famiglia numerosa insieme a nove fratelli. Ha studiato nella città natale, diplomandosi al Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. Ha iniziato la sua carriera in BBC, diventando uno dei volti più noti della televisione, soprattutto come imitatore e macchiettista. La sua mimica è stata accostata a quella del compianto Peter Seller, a tal punto che la sua candidatura fu seriamente presa in considerazione per interpretare il grande comico inglese nel film biograficoTu chiamami Peter, parte andata poi a Geoffrey Rush. Il suo personaggio più famoso è Alan Partridge il grottesco e inverosimile cronista sportivo con la parlata a mitraglia che ha dato luogo a due serie televisive di successo una sitcom e probabilmente un film a cui Coogan sta lavorando. Agli inizi degli anni '90 Coogan ha ricevuto molte attenzioni dai tabloid inglesi per il suo stile di vita e per le sue relazioni sentimentali extramatrimoniali (si è parlato di una love story con Courtney Love che ha dichiarato di aspettare un figlio da Steve). Nel 2007 New York Post ha parlato di un suo coinvolgimento in una brutta faccenda di droga legata al tentato suicidio di Owen Wilson. Fuori dal suo paese, il versatile ed esilarante attore inglese è conosciuto soprattutto per le sue interpretazioni brillanti e sicure in alcuni film di successo come Il giro del mondo in 80 giorni, Tristram Shandy: a cock and bull story, Marie Antoinette dove interpreta Il conte Mercy d'Argenteau, Tropic Thunder con l'amico Ben Stiller, Finding Amanda, Hamlet 2.

DESPITE appearances in movies like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” Steve Coogan, the star of the indie comedy “Hamlet 2,” which opens Friday, is scarcely known in the United States, unless you count stories about him as an occasional Owen Wilson wingman with a fondness for topless dancers. In his native England, though, he is practically a household name, and not just for his even more frequent tabloid appearances there. He is regarded by many as a comic talent and innovator on a level with John Cleese or even Peter Sellers.
Mr. Coogan, 42, is best known for his character Alan Partridge, who began as a clueless sports reporter with an excessive interest in “groinal” injuries and then evolved into a supremely confident and sublimely uninformed talk show host. With his blow-dried hair and toothy smile, Partridge is like David Frost without a brain. Other Coogan characters frequently appearing on TV or in live performances (and anthologized on YouTube) are Paul and Pauline Calf, a mullet-wearing yob and his man-eating sister; Tony Ferrino, a smarmy Portuguese singer; and Tommy Saxondale, a drug-damaged ex-roadie who works as an exterminator.
These people are more than the lightly sketched personas that comedians so often adopt with a few catchphrases or some exaggerated facial expressions. They’re full-fledged characters, with elaborate histories and very specific traits and mannerisms, closer in some ways to genuine dramatic roles than to stand-up shtick. In Britain some critics have even complained that Tommy Saxondale, the newest of the Coogan creations and the main character in a recent BBC sitcom, is so layered and complicated that he’s entirely convincing but not particularly funny.

“The big comic performance is a very obvious thing to do,” said Mr. Coogan, who also appears this summer as a hapless director blown to smithereens in “Tropic Thunder.” “The bolder, more inventive thing sometimes is the subtler, understated performance with minute shades and variations.”
“If you start to disrespect the character you’re playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it’s all technique,” he added. “It’s like watching a juggler — you can be impressed by it, but it’s not going to touch you in any way.”
Mr. Coogan appears in practically every frame of “Hamlet 2,” and no one would call his performance understated. He plays Dana Marschz (pronounced any number of ways), a failed actor turned high school drama teacher who tries to save his job by writing, directing and starring in a musical sequel to “Hamlet” that involves both the Gospel and interplanetary travel. In the play’s big set piece, he descends from heaven, while a pair of low-rider hot rods bounce in approval, and belts out a ballad called “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”
For Marschz, life itself is theater, his own life especially, and he shamelessly resorts to every bad acting trick there is. He mugs, he weeps, he preens, he sulks — he overdoes everything. He may be an even bigger jerk, if a slightly smarter one, than Steve Martin’s Navin R. Johnson character, and Mr. Coogan’s task in the film is somehow to make him endearing as well.
Andrew Fleming, the director of “Hamlet 2,” said recently that he and Pam Brady, who wrote it with him, toyed for a while with the idea of having Mr. Coogan play the character as British. “Steve kept resisting,” Mr. Fleming recalled, “and finally he explained that this kind of unbridled enthusiasm without any intelligence behind it just doesn’t exist in England. There’s no equivalent.”
“It’s a good part,” he added. “We could have set this up with a studio and probably got any one of seven likely suspects” — brand-name comic actors, that is. But working with a studio would have meant castrating the script, he and Ms. Brady figured, and after meeting with Mr. Coogan they decided they weren’t interested in anyone else, anyway.
“It’s playing for very high stakes,” Mr. Coogan said about the part. “If you blink or if you hesitate, you will fail. It’s like running across hot coals. If you stop and think about what you’re doing, you won’t make it. But if you can do a really big performance and pull it off — the stakes are high, but so are the rewards.”
Wait a minute. Didn’t he just say that smaller and subtler was better? Mr. Coogan shrugged. “I’m a populist,” he said. “I want to have it both ways. I like to make people laugh.” His model, he added, was Jack Lemmon, who “even when he was being funny, even when his performance was very, very big, had the ability to invest himself emotionally in what he did, so it was always faithful, and that made it very watchable.”
Recalling Mr. Coogan’s performance, Mr. Fleming said: “Steve has the ability to go way out there — he has the chops. And every now and then we had to pull it in a little. We’d wind up with something that was maybe less comically brilliant, but also more real. It was a calibration thing.”
In person, at least with people he doesn’t know well, Mr. Coogan is much more subdued than he is onstage or on screen. He practically bends over not to be funny, and his discussions of acting could almost, with just a little more earnestness, a little more self-consciousness, be Partridgean. Like a lot of very funny people, what he most seems to want is to be taken seriously.
Mr. Coogan grew up in Manchester, a middle child in a big Irish Catholic family made even bigger by his parents’ willingness to take in foster children. The way he got attention, he said, was by being funny and doing voices, and like most Britons of his generation, he was hugely influenced by American television. An indifferent student, he skipped college in favor of drama school, and while there he began doing voice-overs for commercials. “ ’Lowest prices ever,’ ‘Everything must go’ — that was my first real acting job,” he said, “though I was criticized for not being committed enough to my Stanislavskyesque technique.”
To get into the actors’ union, Mr. Coogan also began doing stand-up, and in 1988 he was hired to do voices for “Spitting Image,” the satirical puppet show. He stayed for five years, impersonating, among others, the politicians John Major, Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher, as well as American celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. “It was a big break for me,” he said. “But at the same time I wasn’t taken seriously.”
He briefly put on a posh accent and explained, “I wasn’t treading the boards with the R.S.C.,” the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I was perceived as the funny-voice guy, and the funny-voice guy doesn’t have gravitas. So I needed instant gravitas, which is pretty hard to come by when you’re 22.”
The solution was to abandon impressions — a “kind of glorified party trick,” he decided — in favor of characters he created himself, and he was clever enough, he says, to enlist the aid of people smarter than he was. The Partridge character, for example, was developed with the help of the playwright Patrick Marber and the writer Peter Baynham, who went on to work with Sacha Baron Cohen on “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
In the fall Mr. Coogan is taking several of his characters on tour in a big, vaudeville-style show that will play in arenas all over England. But his popular success there has become a mixed blessing. “Even worse than being unknown is being a known quantity,” he said. “You’re always being prejudged.”
What appealed to him about “Hamlet 2,” he added, was that it offered a chance to do something different. When he first saw the script, he didn’t think much of the title, but he was won over by an early scene that established Marschz’s history of making high school plays out of movies like “Erin Brockovich.” “That was such a subtle comic choice,” he said. “I was just hoping and praying that the rest of the script would be as consistent.”
Marschz is a terrible actor, Mr. Coogan admitted, and that’s the fun of the part. “There’s a joy in not being subtle but being justified in doing it,” he said. “The character is very overstimulated, almost childlike. He gives me license to do things that would normally be anathema to me.”
He added: “In the U.K. there are very few opportunities for me to experiment except within this little universe I’ve created. But here I can afford to take a big chance and hope it pays off. I figure time may pass me by, so I might as well put all my chips in the middle of the table and see what happens.”
Da The New York Times, 17 Agosto 2008

È nato e cresciuto a Manchester, in Inghilterra, dove ha studiato recitazione presso la Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre. Durante gli studi, si esibiva spesso come stand up comedian e una sera fu notato da un talent scout televisivo che gli offrì una parte in “First Exposure”; questo ruolo gli ha aperto le porte di diversi programmi televisivi fra cui “The Prince’s Gala Trust for the Prince and Princess of Wales”, “Stand-Up”, “Up-Front”, “Paramount City”, “London Underground” e “Word in Your Ear”. E’ inoltre apparso regolarmente in “Spitting Image”, per diversi anni.
Nel 1992 ha vinto il Perrier Award per il suo show “Steve Coogan in Character with John Thompson” con cui ha lanciato il personaggio di Paul Calf, in seguito ospite fisso di “Saturday Zoo”; in questo show, Coogan ha presentato un nuovo personaggio, la sorella di Paul, Pauline Calf. Quindi ha scritto e interpretato “The Paul Calf Video Diaries”, che gli è valso un BAFTA per il video del matrimonio di Pauline Calf: “Three Fights, Two Weddings and a Funeral”.

Mentre lavorava alla radio, ha creato il personaggio di Alan Partridge in “On the Hour”, che ha trasferito in televisione diventando “The Day Today” e da cui è nato lo show “Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge”; anche questo programma è passato in seguito alla TV, ottenendo grandi consensi e numerosi premi.
Ai British Comedy Awards del 1994, Coogan è stato premiato come ‘Top Male Comedy Performer’ e ‘Top Comedy Personality’, mentre “Knowing Me, Knowing You” si è aggiudicato il premio di ‘Best New Television Comedy’.
Coogan quindi è stato il protagonista di diversi film e programmi televisivi fra cui “Resurrected”, “Harry”, “The Indian in the Cupboard”, “Wind in the Willows” di Terry Jones, la serie di BBC 2 “Coogan’s Run”, “Revengers Comedies” e “The Fix”.
Ha scritto e interpretato uno speciale natalizio per BBC 2, “Tony Ferrino’s Phenomenon”, che gli è valso il Silver Rose of Montreux Award; ha inoltre vinto due BAFTA come ‘Best Comedy Series’ e ‘Best Comedy Performance’ per la sua serie “I’m Alan Partridge”.
Coogan è stato il protagonista di una tournée che ha registrato il tutto esaurito in Inghilterra, dal titolo “Steve Coogan: The Man Who Thinks He’s It”: lo spettacolo gli ha meritato un South Bank Show Award ed è stato campione di incassi nella West End londinese.
Coogan ha quindi impiegato un paio d’anni per scrivere il film “The Parole Officer”, insieme al suo socio in affari Henry Normal; il film è stato numero uno ai botteghini inglesi.
Tre anni fa, Coogan e Normal hanno fondato la propria società di produzione, la Baby Cow Productions, con cui hanno prodotto diversi programmi di successo, fra cui “Marion & Geoff”, “Human Remains”, “The Mighty Boosh”, “Gavin and Stacey”, “Sensitive Skin”, “Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible”, “A Small Summer Party”, “Up in Town” con Joanna Lumley, nonché il TV movie della BBC 2 “Cruise of the Gods”.
Nell’aprile del 2002 è uscito il cult “24 Hour Party People”, diretto da Michael Winterbottom, un film sulla Factory Records e sull’ascesa e caduta di Tony Wilson, interpretato da Coogan.
Nell’autunno del 2002, Coogan ha esordito in una nuova serie di “I’m Alan Partridge”, nuovamente acclamata dalla critica. Nel 2003 l’attore ha interpretato Samuel Pepys nel dramma storico della BBC2 “The Private Life of Samuel Pepys”, che narra le vicende del famoso scrittore. Quindi ha recitato nel film di Frank Coraci “Around the World in 80 Days” (Il giro del mondo in 80 giorni) nel ruolo di Phileas Fogg, al fianco di Jackie Chan-Passepartout. Coogan è apparso anche in un segmento del film di Jim Jarmusch “Coffee and Cigarettes”, presentato al Festival di Venezia 2004.
Di recente Coogan ha recitato in diversi film, fra cui “A Cock and Bull Story” di Michael Winterbottom, “Marie Antoinette” di Sofia Coppola e in “Night at the Museum” (Una notte al museo) di Ben Stiller, in cui interpretava il ruolo della memorabile miniatura del soldato romano Ottavio.
E’ apparso nella serie HBO di Larry David “Curb Your Enthusiasm” e di recente ha ultimato le riprese della seconda serie dello show comico in onda su BBC 2, “Saxondale”.
Coogan ha inoltre presentato la divertente e innovativa commedia “Hamlet 2”, per la regia di Andrew Fleming; gli altri attori sono Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler e David Arquette.