Lorne Michaels: the ringmaster at Saturday Night Live

Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live, a cultural phenomenon that launched the careers of countless stars in America.

Lorne Michaels attends SNL50: The Homecoming Concert
(Image credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

“Try telling the story of American comedy without mentioning Saturday Night Live and see how far you get,” says the Financial Times. For half a century, the TV sketch show has been a US cultural fixture; the launch pad from which countless cast members – including Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Bill Murray – “ascended to stardom”. Ironic, then, that the enigmatic ringmaster behind it all, “whose vowels were once said to have inspired Dr Evil in the Austin Powers movies”, should be a Canadian.

At 81, Lorne Michaels looks nothing like the long-haired prankster who got “SNL” underway in 1975. But he is still cranking out the shows. Cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret of his “extraordinary tenure”, writes biographer Susan Morrison in The New Yorker. Half believe Michaels is “a once-in-a-lifetime talent, a producer nonpareil”. Others see him more as “a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.