Russell Brand first came to notice as a stand-up comic at a Hackney Empire new talent competition in 2000. His unique personal style, evoking the notion of Dickens’ Artful Dodger auditioning for The Cure, was evident even then. By the end of the following year he had already won and lost a job as a presenter on MTV Europe. The dismissal was triggered by Brand’s decision to turn up for a day’s filming dressed as Osama Bin Laden on the day after the September 11 attacks.

His next project was for short-lived digital TV channel UK Play. RE:Brandwas a brief series of gonzo documentaries climaxing with a homosexual tryst for the avowedly, indeed conspicuously heterosexual Brand in a pub toilet. In his autobiography, My Booky Wook, Brand admits that he was regularly taking heroin during this period.

RE:Brand was enough to bring him to the attention of the producers of reality show Big Brother, and Brand was invited to host one of the numerous digital-only spin-off shows from the all-conquering behemoth. It was a turning point for Brand, who was a substantial hit with the Big Brother audience and he went on to appear on TV with his own show for Channel 4 as well as on a number of TV quiz shows. Around this time Brand also became a regular on the pages of gossip magazines, regularly appearing in red carpet photo-spreads with a succession of appealing young starlets on his arm.

He simultaneously relaunched his radio career, which had foundered after he was sacked from indie rock station xFM for reading pornographic stories on air, with a freewheeling late-evening mixture of music, phone-in chat and wild surmise for Radio 2. He also began a regular comment column for The Guardian newspaper, touching on his intense passion for football in general and West Ham United in particular.

Perhaps the most unpredictable strand of this wayward polymath’s precipitous rise has been his acting career, beginning in 1994 with a small part in ITV police soap The Bill but then leaping through a number of TV comedies (including most memorably a very dressed-down appearance in doomed rehab comedy The Abbey) before his first feature film appearance in 2007’s reboot of the St.Trinians series.

In 2008 he has already appeared as a dissolute rock star in Judd Apatow’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall and will soon be on screens in Disney’s Bedtime Stories, alongside Adam Sandler, Courtney Cox and Guy Pearce. 2009 threatens another outing for Brand’s louche rocker character from Sarah Marshall in Judd Apatow’s followup Get Him to the Greek.

His formidably varied CV belies the implication from his autobiography that Brand is a happy wastrel with no strong career plan. His is a star that will shine at least as long as his famously backcombed hair can cling to the top of that that coolly calculating brain.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Vote for the Breakthrough Award winner
• David Tennant back as Hamlet after back surgery
• Matt Smith is the new Dr Who