The Emmy-winning stand-up is taking a break from life on the road to concentrate on his acting career.

But he's promised he will return.

He said: "I could do stand-up till I drop. I'm learning German so I can do gigs in Berlin."

Izzard stars in three films to be released in Britain this year. In the first, The Criminal, which is released on Friday, he plays a forensic scientist.

But playing it straight wasn't too much of a challenge, he told The Guardian.

"Playing a solemn bastard on film is easier," he said. "Comedians are really solemn bastards anyway.

"They develop comedy as a social tool at school, then you go professional and do it all the time on stage, so you become less and less fun off stage, so you become a solemn bastard."

Eddie Izzard says he's had a stalker.

The comic told FHM magazine the stalker kept turning up asking him where he was going that night and could she come with him.

He says she did follow him for about a month on tour in America.

"She got hold of my phone number," he said. "But when she called me I denied it was me and gave her my tour manager's number. He spent hours talking on the phone with her."

The transvestite comic, who is straight, also admitted he's taken advantage of comedy groupies.

Eddie 'haunted by spectre of Chaplin'

"I feel as though I have this angry spectre following me everywhere," he said in a break from making The Cat's Meow.

"It's as though I am being told 'How dare you?' Nothing, absolutely nothing comes harder than this.

"I knew from the second I put my name on the dotted line that I could be blowing everything that was going so well. But I just couldn't resist the opportunity."

Peter Bogdanovich is making his movie comeback directing the £10 million drama in Berlin and the Greek Islands.

The story centres on a cruise on a fabulous motor launch owned by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst where guest businessman Thomas Ince is accidentally shot dead.

Hearst, portrayed by Edward Hermann, fires the bullet meant for Chaplin, who was allegedly having a fling with the billionaire's mistress Marion Davis, played by Kirsten Dunst.

Izzard got his screen acting career under way in Velvet Goldmine and The Avengers. He will also be seen in the much-talked-about Shadow Of The Vampire with John Malkovich

Robert Downey Jr was the last actor to play the late, great silent movie star in Richard Attenborough's Chaplin. The performance won him an Oscar nomination.

" If I got anywhere near that I would be very proud," said Izzard. "I have done my research. I just hope I get it somewhere near right. This is one time I don't want to be seen as a clown."

Izzard and LeBlanc Skirt the Issue

It’s Some Like It Hot-meets-Raiders of the Lost Ark,” EDDIE IZZARD says of All the Queen’s Men, in which he plays a cross-dressing lounge singer-turned-British spy. While Izzard (Mystery Men) certainly had the credentials for the drag part of the role-he won two Emmys for the HBO version of his one-man stage show Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill-what he really wanted was to be a hero. Unfortunately for him, his costar MATT LEBLANC (Charlie’s Angels) got that end of the deal. “Matt kicks and shoots and beats everything that moves,” Izzard says. “I had to beg for any bits of action: ‘Can I just shoot a gun? Can I tap a Nazi on the head or something?’ ”

In this action-comedy set during World War II, four Allied soldiers, led by an American OSS officer (LeBlanc), are dropped into Berlin to steal the vital Enigma encryption machine. (It is at least the third recent project, along with U-571 and Enigma, to deal with the famous German encoding device.) But since men are absent in Berlin-they’re all on the front lines-our heroes must disguise themselves as the fairer sex in order to avoid suspicion. They are picked up by a truckload of rowdy Germans who mistake them for prostitutes. Complexities ensue.

The script had been in limbo at Universal for about 15 years until producer MARCO WEBER (The Thirteenth Floor) bought it, commissioned a rewrite, and sent it to Austrian director STEFAN RUZOWITZKY, who he thought would be the right man for the job after seeing the director’s 1998 drama The Inheritors. “I felt there was great potential in this mix of humor and drama,” Ruzowitzky says. “It would be possible to approach it as a broad, campy comedy, but we wanted to concentrate on the war and the action and make an intelligent comedy.” This meant listening to Izzard, who wanted to change some of his character’s more acerbic one-liners and “get as far away as possible from the cliché ‘gay drag queen,’” Ruzowitzky says. “Eddie’s mission in life is to prove the difference between a gay drag queen, which he is not, and a straight transvestite, which he is. That [makes] the story more complex and interesting.” For LeBlanc, getting around in high heels was complex enough. “I gave Matt tips on walking,” says Izzard, who helped his costar develop a feminine gait Izzard describes as “passable without him feeling he was going completely girly.”

LeBlanc’s other challenge was negotiating his sitcom schedule, which called for him to fly back and forth each week from the Friends set in L.A. to Austria and Hungary, where All the Queen’s Men was shot. “It was a nightmare,” Ruzowitzky says. “There’s a [scene in which] a plane crashes into a house, and we had to do the outside shot when we crash into the house first, then rebuild the house and do the interior shot [with Matt].” Not that all that traveling was without perks. “I own a Lufthansa plane now,” LeBlanc jokes. “They said, ‘Do you want the miles or the plane?’ I took the plane.”

On board was a glittering guest list: actress Marion Davies, who was Hearst's mistress; Charlie Chaplin; Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons; and Elinor Glyn, the racy British novelist. Bogdanovich, 61, has assembled an intriguing cast that includes in key roles two British actors closely associated with comedy: Joanna Lumley is Elinor Glyn, who narrates the story in voice-over, while Eddie Izzard plays Chaplin - though not for laughs. Kirsten Dunst is Marion Davies, Jennifer Tilly portrays Louella Parsons, and veteran American Edward Herrmann plays Hearst.

At a studio in former East Berlin, the lavish wood-panelled dining room of the Oneida had been reconstructed. A long banqueting table was set for dinner with silver cutlery - and the ketchup that Hearst liked so much. The cast were dressed for a formal dinner in tuxedos and long gowns. To establish character, Bogdanovich had devised a tracking shot along the table, passing each of Hearst's guests involved in witty, brittle dialogue with their neighbours.

With neat, swept-back hair and tinted horn-rimmed glasses, Bogdanovich saunters around the set, prompting members of the cast in a soft voice. He moves languidly and has a deadpan manner - but he commands authority. An entertaining conversationalist, he eagerly regales listeners with anecdotes about great film-makers. "Did you ever meet Jean Renoir? A wonderful man."

In his early role as a documentarian and critic for magazines such as Esquire, Bogdanovich met many legendary names, Howard Hawks and John Ford among them. He befriended one in particular - Orson Welles, who was by then down on his luck and ostracised by Hollywood's power-brokers. It was Welles who first tipped him off about the tale that became The Cat's Meow.

"Orson told me the whisper about this story in 1969," he says. "We were doing a book together about his films, and Hearst's name came up. This story was in the first draft of Citizen Kane, but Orson took it out. He said Herman Mankiewicz [Welles's co-screenwriter] put it in, in an early draft originally called American. Orson took it out. 'I didn't think Charlie Kane was a killer,' Orson told me."

Bogdanovich plays down the exact details of the story, fearing that too much advance information might spoil The Cat's Meow. "At the start of the movie you know there was a shooting, because it begins with a funeral," he says. "You know someone's going to get hurt - the question is who? All these famous people were reputed to be on the yacht, and there are several versions of who they were. In her narration, Elinor Glyn says, 'Everything was told in whispers. This is the whisper told most often.' But no one knows what really happened on that yacht."

The director relates all this with enthusiasm. There is no indication of the troubles and setbacks that he once suffered in an extraordinary fall from grace. It's hard to convey what an important figure he was 30 years ago. He first made a splash in 1971 with The Last Picture Show, his elegiac black-and-white classic. Then in consecutive years he enjoyed huge hits with What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon.

He estimates that together these three films grossed 10 times their production costs, a figure that now seems unthinkable. Critics and audiences alike loved his work. Blessed with an agile mind, he made commercial films that were thoughtful, literate, and generously acknowledged the memory of early Hollywood legends such as Welles, Ford and Hawks.

He got very rich very quickly, bought a mansion in Bel-Air, and lived with the leading lady whom he had created: Cybill Shepherd, star of The Last Picture Show. In four short years he had become king of his world. Then his bubble burst abruptly. His next films were showcases for Shepherd, but Daisy Miller (a Henry James adaptation) and At Long Last Love (a disastrous homage to Astaire and Rogers musicals) failed at the box-office, as did Nickelodeon, a comedy about the silent-movie era. He and Shepherd split up - and then his life became immeasurably worse.

His next protegee was his mistress, Dorothy Stratten, a former Playboy centrefold. Grooming her for stardom, he gave her a role in his film They All Laughed. But before the film opened, she was shot dead by her estranged husband. Then the film was shelved by its distributor, 20th Century Fox, so he took it over himself, with disastrous results. Its woeful box-office performance cost him $5 million, and he declared bankruptcy. Many in Hollywood openly gloated at Bogdanovich's comeuppance.

His career was briefly resurrected in 1985 with the well-received Mask. But his later marriage to Stratten's 20-year-old sister Louise (who was only 12 when Dorothy died) revived the gossip among his enemies. It has been a hard road, then, and The Cat's Meow is Bogdanovich's first feature film since 1993's little-seen effort The Thing Called Love. In between, he has made half a dozen forgettable TV movies.

But there are signs of a comeback. Bogdanovich has a cameo in the hit TV series The Sopranos. He and his producers plan to take The Cat's Meow to Cannes, before releasing it in this country later this year. There is also the heartening development that he has been taken under Quentin Tarantino's wing. After Bogdanovich declared bankruptcy a second time in 1997, when a court ruled that he owed $4.2 million in a property dispute, Tarantino invited him to stay at his home, and offered support - in much the same way that Bogdanovich had assisted Welles decades earlier.

"We've become friends," he says dryly of Tarantino. "I think he's good, and he thinks I'm good, so we get along."

Tarantino will act in Bogdanovich's next film, Wait For Me, a ghost story in which a movie director looks back on his life, playing one of six ghosts in the film. Bogdanovich says shooting will start this summer. Jerry Lewis will play a cameo role and Cybill Shepherd may also appear.

"After that, I have a film called Squirrels to the Nuts lined up," he adds. "With a title like that, it had better be a comedy, and it is - a sex comedy set in New York."

Despite his mixed fortunes, Bogdanovich still has a luminous reputation among actors. Joanna Lumley said that she had put on hold a commitment with BBC TV to play Elinor Glyn. "It meant going to Germany, and none of us is working for much money," she said. "But it's a chance to work with Peter."

Could it be that Bogdanovich will pull off one of the most astonishing comebacks in movie history? He raises his eyebrows, somewhere between resignation and disbelief. "In this business, who can ever tell?"