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Simon Helberg

American actor and comedian

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ299297
Source-derived summary

Simon Maxwell Helberg (born December 9, 1980) is an American actor and comedian. He is widely known for playing Howard Wolowitz on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019) and won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for the role. His performance as Cosmé McMoon in the film Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. Helberg has also appeared on the sketch comedy series MADtv as a cast member in season 8 (2002–2003), and his other film roles including Old School (2003), Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), A Serious Man (2009), and Annette (2021).

Early life

Simon Maxwell Helberg was born on December 9, 1980, in Los Angeles. His parents are actor Sandy Helberg and casting director Harriet Helberg (née Birnbaum). He was raised Jewish, "Conservative to Reform but more Reform as time went on."

Helberg attended middle and high school at the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California, with Jason Ritter, who later became his roommate at New York University. He attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he trained at the Atlantic Theater Company.

Career

Since the early 2000s, Helberg performed with comedian Derek Waters as the sketch comedy duo Derek & Simon. In 2007, the two starred together in Derek and Simon: The Show, a web series they created with comedian Bob Odenkirk for the comedy website Super Deluxe.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Simon Helberg” is american actor and comedian. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Simon, Helberg and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1980, 2007, 2019, 2016—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1980-12-09. For this dossier, Simon, Helberg and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american actor and comedian” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q299297. VIAF identifies the subject as 91193313. The Library of Congress control number is no2009114717. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2007, 2019 and 2016.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Simon Helberg”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Simon Helberg primary sources, Simon Helberg archive and Simon research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Simon Helberg”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Simon Helberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.