NEW YORK (AP) - Borat is dead. Sacha Baron Cohen tells The Daily Telegraph that he's retiring the clueless Kazakh journalist, as well as his alter ego, aspiring rapper Ali G.

''When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing,'' the 36-year-old actor-comedian says in the British newspaper's Friday edition.

''It is like saying goodbye to a loved one. It is hard, and the problem with success, although it's fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I 'get' with Borat again, so it's a kind of self-defeating form, really.''

Baron Cohen brought Borat Sagdiyev - an anti-Semitic buffoon in search of Pamela Anderson - to the masses last year with his smash comedy, ''Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.'' He first introduced the character on ''Da Ali G Show,'' which was carried in the U.S. on HBO.

''It's much easier for me to be in character and it's a lot more fun,'' he says. ''If I'd done the entire promotional campaign for (the 'Borat' movie) as myself it wouldn't have developed in the same way.''

Baron Cohen - not Borat - can be seen as a singing barber in Tim Burton's ''Sweeney Todd,'' co-starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

His spokesman, Matt Labov, did not immediately return phone and e-mail messages by The Associated Press seeking comment on the ''deaths'' of Borat and Ali G.

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