Omid Djalili

Omid Djalili is a British stand-up comedian, actor, television producer and writer.

Djalili was born on 30 September 1965 in St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, London, to Iranian Baháʼí parents Ahmad and Parvaneh Djalili. His parents emigrated from Tehran to London in 1958. He has a brother and sister. His mother was a dressmaker who at one point assisted Iranian singer Googoosh. His father was a liaison officer at the Iranian embassy in which he would provide medical assistance. He was also a photographer whose pictures ended up in the newspaper Kayhan. He attended Holland Park School where he failed A-level exams a record six times and faked his results to gain entry to Ulster University in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, studying English and theatre studies having been turned down by 16 drama schools. Djalili cited Jack Lemmon, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Julia Roberts as influences.

The first significant success of his stand-up comedy career was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1995 with “Short, Fat Kebab Shop Owner’s Son”, followed by “The Arab and the Jew” with Jewish comedian Ivor Dembina in 1996.

Djalili has appeared in a number of films, most notably Gladiator, The Mummy, Mean Machine, The World Is Not Enough, Alien Autopsy, Spy Game, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Grow Your Own, Notting Hill, Mr Nice, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Sex and the City 2 and provides his voice in Over the Hedge. He has observed that he usually appears as a generic Middle Eastern background character in many of these films, often commenting that he appears in the James Bond film as the “Second Azerbaijani oil pipe attendant”. He appeared as Nasim in 22 episodes of the U.S. sitcom Whoopi, starring Whoopi Goldberg, and picked up an international film award for Best Supporting Actor in Casanova, starring alongside Heath Ledger and Jeremy Irons.

Djalili has won awards for his comedy. These include the EMMA Award, Time Out Award, and LWT Comedy Award for Best Stand-up Comedian, Spirit of the Fringe Award as well as the One World Media Award for his Channel 4 documentary, Bloody Foreigners. He has also been nominated for awards, such as the Perrier Award for Best Comedian, the Gemini Award for Best Comedy Performance of 2003, the South Bank Award for Best Comedy of 2003, the Royal Television Society Award for Best Stand-up, and the European TV Award for his Bloody Foreigners.