Isla Lang Fisher is a Scottish Australian actress and author, who began her career on Australian television. Born to Scottish parents in Oman, she moved to Australia at age six. After appearing in television commercials at a young age, Fisher came to prominence for her portrayal of Shannon Reed on the soap opera Home and Away from 1994 to 1997, garnering two Logie Award nominations. Take a look below for 28 more awesome and interesting facts about Isla Fisher.

1. Fisher was born in Muscat, Oman, the daughter of Scottish parents Elspeth Reid and Brian Fisher.

2. Her father worked as a banker in Oman for the United Nations at that time.

3. When she was a child, Fisher and her family moved back to their hometown of Bathgate in Scotland, then to Perth, Western Australia, when she was 6 years old.

4. She has four siblings and has said that she had a “great” upbringing in Perth with a “very outdoorsy life.”

5. Fisher has stated that her “sensibility is Australian,” she has a “laid-back attitude to life,” and she feels “very Australian.”

6. She considers herself a feminist.

7. Her mother and siblings live in Athens, Greece, while her father divides his time between Frankfurt, Germany, and Nicaragua.

8. Fisher attended Swanbourne Primary School and Methodist Ladies’ College.

9. She appeared in lead roles in school productions such as Little Shop of Horrors. 

10. At 21, she attended L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, where she studied clown, mime and commedia dell’arte.

11. Fisher made her first on-screen appearances in commercials on Australian television at the age of 9, and made her professional acting debut in 1993, with two guest-starring roles in children’s television shows Bay City and Paradise Beach.

12. At age 18, with the help of her mother, she published two teen novels, Bewitched and Seduced by Fame; in a 2005 interview with Sunday Mirror, Fisher admitted that had she not been successful as an actress she would probably have been a full-time writer.

13. Between 1994 and 1997, Fisher played the role of Shannon Reed, a bisexual unconfident young woman who develops anorexia, on the Australian soap opera Home and Away.

14. In a 1996 interview with The Sun-Herald, Fisher spoke of her success and experiences on the show. “I would be stupid to let it go to my head because it could all end tomorrow and I would just fade back into obscurity.”

15. For her performance in the series, Fisher received nominations for Most Popular New Talent at the 1995 Logie Awards, and for Most Popular Actress at the 1997 ceremony.

16. After leaving the soap, Fisher enrolled at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a theater and arts training school in Paris, and went on to appear in pantomime in the United Kingdom.

17. She also toured with Darren Day in the musical Summer Holiday and appeared in the London theater production Così.

18. Fisher played an ill-fated member in a group of international students from an elite Prague school in the German slasher film Swimming Pool (2001)

19. Fisher first met the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in 2002, at a party in Sydney, Australia.

20. The two became engaged in 2004 and, in a Jewish ceremony in Paris, France, were married on March 15, 2010.

21. The couple has three children.

22. The family now resides in London and Los Angeles.

23. Before marrying, Fisher converted to Judaism, saying, “I will definitely have a Jewish wedding just to be with Sacha. I would do anything—move into any religion—to be united in marriage with him. We have a future together and religion comes second to love as far as we are concerned.”

24. She completed her conversion in early 2007, after three years of study.

25. She took the Hebrew name Ayala (איילה), the Hebrew word for a doe, and has described herself as keeping the Jewish Sabbath.

26. In 2014 and 2015, Fisher donated her signed shoes for Small Steps Project Celebrity Shoe Auction.

27. In December 2015, Fisher and her husband Baron Cohen donated $500,000 to Save the Children as part of a program to vaccinate children in Northern Syria against measles, and the same amount to the International Rescue Committee also aimed at helping Syrian refugees.

28. In Visions (2015), an independent horror film, Fisher starred as a pregnant woman who begins to experience supernatural manifestations after moving to a vineyard with her husband.