Stephen Colbert picked the French-sounding pronunciation of his surname on moving to college
Stephen Colbert's family said KOHL-bert. His father preferred the French-sounding version but kept the old one out of respect and let his children choose; Stephen switched to kohl-BAIR on transferring to Northwestern, where nobody knew him. His ancestry, meanwhile, is fifteen-sixteenths Irish.
He was born in Washington, D.C., on 13 May 1964, the youngest of eleven children in a devout but questioning Catholic household, and grew up on James Island near Charleston, South Carolina. His father was an immunologist and medical school dean. Noticing that television tended to make Southerners look slow-witted, the boy trained himself to talk like network news anchors, John Chancellor above all.
On 11 September 1974, when he was ten, his father and the two brothers nearest him in age were killed when Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashed while landing at Charlotte. He withdrew, later saying nothing made sense afterwards, and lost himself in Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, which he came to regard as early practice in acting and improvisation. He had hoped to be a marine biologist, but ear surgery left him deaf on the right side and ruled out scuba diving.
He studied philosophy at Hampden-Sydney College from 1982, acquiring a taste for Marcus Aurelius, then moved to Northwestern in 1984 to study theatre, graduating in 1986. He meant to be a serious dramatic actor and looked down on comedy improv. Needing money, he turned down an unpaid internship on Letterman's Late Night and took a job answering phones at Second City, where staff got free classes. He enrolled, loved it, and was soon touring as Steve Carell's understudy alongside Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, who at first found him uptight and pretentious.
The trio made Exit 57, which lasted 12 episodes across 1995 and 1996, and later Strangers with Candy. Wider fame came through The Daily Show and then The Colbert Report, launched in 2005, whose first episode coined truthiness, which the American Dialect Society went on to choose as its Word of the Year. In 2015 he took over the Late Show on CBS from David Letterman and hosted it until 2026, collecting eleven Primetime Emmys, two Grammys and three Peabodys over his career.
Source: Stephen Colbert
