It took years to tell Dad I was a transvestite.

Now all I want is for blokeish men to say that I'm OK.

Comedian Eddie Izzard On His Confused Sexuality And Need To Be Loved

By Angela Levin Daily Mail

Eddie Izzard has made his name wearing women's clothes. At one recent Establishment party he turned up in a black suit with mandarin collar, high-heeled boots, black eyeliner, blood-red lipstick and nail polish to match. He chose his look very carefully and spent a long time getting his make-up just right. Many think he is the best stand-up comic around. His countrywide tour was so successful that an extra final show for an audience of 8,000 was fixed for last night in London. Channel 4 gave him four hours of prime telly time, called Channel Izzard, at the weekend. He's starring in two films: The Avengers, with Ralph Fiennes, and Velvet Goldmine, to be released next year. Eddie, 35, prides himself on being a pioneer for transvestites, hoping to do for them what the Teletubbies have done for fat, cuddly toys.

"I want to take teevees," he says, his way of referring to transvestites, "away from the fringe area and introduce them into society - but through comedy rather than just being someone who clumps around in a dress. As I look at it, women wear dresses, so why not men?"

I caught up with Eddie in a sumptous hotel, where he was enjoying a break between his round-the-country shows.

Seeing Eddie in the flesh is a confusing experience. He claims to be 5ft 9in, but looks shorter. His hands are soft and feminine with long fingernails varnished a fashionable purple. He has blond highlights in his short, carefully tousled hair. He wasn't wearing make-up and his Desperate Dan jaw had a hint of designer stubble. His gestures are neither obviously male nor female. He was wearing a too-tight black, long-sleeved top that emphasised his flat chest and large rib cage, and bell-bottomed shiny black trousers. His size seven feet were encased in high-heeled boots. He sat in true Fifties finishing-school style with one leg neatly placed over the other at an angle. Nor was it just me who was bemused. The upper-crust hotel guests kept looking at him out of the corner of their eyes but, in true British style, their expressions remained impassive. One can understand their bewilderment. Should you relate to him as a male or female? Indeed, which sex does he want to be? A few years ago, I spent some time writing about men who wear women's clothes - transsexuals and transvestites. Transsexuals are sad individuals who, from being toddlers, are convinced they were born into the wrong bodies and are driven to change their sex. Transvestites, however, are often less troubled. While they like, or feel the need, to dress in women's clothes, they are happy to stay as men. Mick Jagger, for example, shows a partiality for female gear, but there's no mistaking his sexuality. Eddie calls himself a transvestite, but says that although he'd be "happy to be a woman" he doesn't want hormone treatment because he's too big-boned and "wouldn't look right". It's been put to Eddie that his cross-dressing might be a result of having been devastated by the death from cancer of his mother, Dorothy, when he was six. He admits he's never come to terms with his loss, but denies it as the cause.

"It's genetic," he explains. "I've wanted to wear girls' clothes since I was four, when I saw a young boy on our estate wearing a dress. I did try to see a psychiatrist about it at college, but couldn't get an appointment. Not that it would have helped." He insists he has a masculine approach to things. "My thinking is testosterone-controlled, but I have oestrogen sensibilities." He also has an oestrogen-controlled attitude to clothes, talking about them with great enthusiasm and deliberately emphasising women's sizes. "I buy things off the peg, ranging from Jean-Paul Gaultier to Next and M&S. From the waist down, I'm a size 12 and 12-14 on top. I'm very relaxed about what I wear. "I particularly love working out what goes with what. I also cleanse, tone and moisturise my skin every day, but I don't worry about wrinkles because I'll always look like a bloke wearing make-up."

On the question of which gender he fancies, Eddie is in no doubt. "I fancy women," he says, wrapping his arms round his flat chest, " although I admit that very square women don't fancy me. They go for Captain Normal. I also have a problem with very square men, who think I'm homosexual. I've tried fancying men, but I can't. "The best description of me is a male lesbian. By accesssing my female side, I appreciate my male side more." He leans forward in the armchair. "If everyone was as honest about their sexuality as I am, we'd have a greater understanding of each other. Men, in particular, are so blocked." Although Eddie claims to be open about his sexuality, when I asked when he last had a girlfriend he became as blocked as other men: "I can't remember." Eddie prefers to be in control of conversation. "I've been fairly loose and free for the past few years. I'd like to get to the stage where I fancy settling down with one partner, but I'm concentrating on touring and making it in America."

Eddie Izzard was born on February 7th, 1962, in Aden, where his father John was working for BP. The family returned to Britain a few years later. Eddie liked football and - as he grew up - mountaineering and going on Outward Bound courses. He remembers his mother, a midwife, as being very caring. "She used to bring me hot, milky coffee, when I woke up in the night." When she became terminally ill in 1968, Eddie and his elder brother Mark were sent away to a boarding school. His parents chose St John's in Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan, which was strict, old-fashioned and believed in caning. Eddie, who was dyslexic, hated it. When he heard his mother had died, he started crying and barely stopped for years. "I couldn't make sense of what had happened, but when I reached 11, I decided to block off my emotions." He has, it seems, never let them fully return. The year after his mother's death, his father, then chief auditor for BP, switched his sons to the more liberal St Bede's in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and two years later to Eastbourne College. He remarried when Eddie was 13. When Eddie met his future stepmother, Kate, he told her all about his mother. Eddie went to Sheffield University to study accountancy, but spent his time writing and performing sketches. He dropped out after a year. He performed at the Edinburgh Festival and in 1991 was nominated for the prestigious Perrier Award. Two years later, he took his show to the West End and won the British Comedy Award for Best Stand-up Comedian.

He has since successfully toured America, Paris and Amsterdam and brought out two best-selling videos - Unrepeatable and Definite Article. Last year he again won Best Stand-up Comedian at the British Comedy Awards. Eddie started dressing as a woman in secret in his bedroom as a teenager. But when he was 23 he decide to tell a female friend whose brother was gay. She was so supportive that Eddie told other friends and joined a transvestite support group in London. Telling his father was a different story.

"I built up to it for years. I told him when I was 29. We'd just been to a Crystal Palace football match. He just said: 'That's OK.' Even though he's convention itself, he's been very supportive. I'm so pleased I confronted my fear and told him." "I'd have been frustrated if I hadn't. I always thought I'd be a comedian with a huge secret. But once I told my dad, I felt free to reveal it on stage. Ever since, I've refused to apologise for being teevee."

Eddie has worked hard for his success. He began as a street artist in Covent Garden and Edinburgh, but remembering those early, difficult days makes him cringe. "I was abysmal. I couldn't hold anyone's attention for five minutes. But gradually I learned how to keep an audience and can now do a two-hour show." Despite his increasing success, he won't let his emotions run away with him.

"I never allow myself to get hugely elated or depressed," he says. "I don't confide in people, probably keep my own counsel too much and keep my emotions suppressed. I learned to do it as a result of my mother's death. It's certainly a good way of surviving under pressure." So it comes as no surprise that he lives alone in a South London flat and has little time for life outside of his work. He remains driven. "One of the problems of loss at an early age is that it leaves you with a tremendous need to be loved," he says. "It's why I love performing to a live audience. I could never stop. It's a drug for me. "Now all I want is for blokeish men to say I'm OK, but...." he smiles coyly, "some people will always consider me over the line."

Eddie Izzard. A man of many things, many of which are surreal.

Review of the 'Glorious' tour

by Tommy Clarke

London Arena. A strange venue, i thought to hold a comedy show. I thought the atmosphere would be stiffled, i thought it would be too big, in short i thought it could not live up to holding Eddie Izzard. Before the show had started these fears were dispelled. The first thing i saw inside the arena was the merchandise stand. Izzla Rizla papers. Top idea. They even got a mention in the editorial of Kerrang magazine. Then there was the set. The remains of a fallen basillica. Different. Not your usual stage set, but who ever said that Eddie Izzard was your usual comic. The house lights went down, the spot lights zipped around the arena, the music started, and then he arrived. Splendid in a red silky suit. Picking up where he left off from the Definate Article Tour, Izzard strolled into his opening, of the Old Testament like he was there. But were James Mason, Mrs Badcrumble and Sean Connery, probably not, but they were now. Connery, as Noah riding along on a speed boat instead of the arc. James Mason setting as God, setting himself a time limit of only seven days to make the world. Is it possible. Mrs Badcrumble as Gods mum. Subjects such as ducks, Robin hood, the new testament, showers and safe crackers were all there in full splendor. One of Izzards fave topics appeared, thumbs. A round of applause must go out to Izzard for bravely tackling the topic of Diana in such a tactful way. You could hear the intake of breath when he brought up the subject. You could hear the silence of the audience wondering how he would deal with such a sensitive topic, but soon he had the audience in laughter again. Even when Izzards radio mic went down he still carried on. His reasons for not using a hand-held mic was that 'it got in the way during crucifiction scenes'. The title of the tour 'Glorious' was the right one and it summed up the peformance of Britains best standup comedian. Eddie Izzard is 'Glorious'

The Independent 15th August 1999

Long, long ago, in a land of volcanoes and coral reefs, where the warm
Pacific breeze ruffles the coconut palms, the local inhabitants came up
with a concept that was to become central to alternative comedy: the
taboo. From Lenny Bruce to Eddie Izzard, alternative comedy can be seen
as a sustained effort to shed light on those areas of life that still qualify for the one Polynesian word that we all know.

Back in the 1960s, Lenny Bruce was making his name by getting arrested
for breaking the taboos surrounding four-letter words, six-letter words
and 11-letter words (if you're counting, that last one ends with
"sucking"). Bruce believed that by constantly repeating "nigger" , "yid" or "greaseball" you could rob these words of their violence. He called his autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People and if that sounds facetious, well, he was in earnest. Bruce believed in logic and laws, and for all his hilarity he was more than a bit rabbinical. It's no surprise that Bob Dylan named a song after him.

If Bruce's stage act was edgy, angry and disturbing, then Eddie Izzard'
s performance in Lenny, Julian Barry's biographical play, is only
loveable and untroubling. For the director, Sir Peter Hall, the idea of
casting Izzard as a stand-up comic with a gift for surreal flights of
fancy was probably irresistible. If so, it was only a so-so idea. If you
are doing a play about a highly individual free-wheeling comic, the last
person you need is another highly individual free-wheeling comic. You
want an actor.

Izzard turns in a Herculean performance as Lenny. He throws everything
at the role, from the uncompromising opening - where he is naked - to
his death from a morphine overdose at the end. He's daring, exhaustive
and often funny. But as he grabs at words, stutters in the middle of riffs or hurries through the domestic scenes, he looks as if all he wants to do is get on with his own material. Hell is other people' s lines.

There are two types of dialogue Izzard likes. He can have a conversation
between various characters (so long as he does all the voices himself)
or he can talk to the audience and share his thoughts. What he doesn' t
look comfortable doing is talking to these other guys standing around
called actors. They work to another beat. It's as if a jazz player - who
keeps wanting to cut loose and show us what he can do - finds himself
trapped in the middle of an orchestra.

His black hair, sideburns and fleshy face look more like Elvis than Lenny. He gives us the Lenny Stance, where the elbow perches on the
microphone stand and he gives us the Izzard Walk, those lumbering steps
that suggest he's about to play lead guitar. He does the famous routines
well. When he's repeating the words "to" and "come" over and over again
in a prose poem of sexual anxiety or heading off into an extended
fantasy about Jesus and Moses visiting St Patrick's Cathedral, then Izzard is at his best. When he asks the lepers in the Cathedral not to touch anything, Eddie and Lenny make a perfect match. These sections win the audience right over, and then, in the bits in between, they slip out of his grasp again.

It's the scenes from Lenny's life - which interweave with the routines - that sink this overlong production. We watch in disbelief as Izzard takes his wife Rusty (an impressive Elizabeth Berkley) back to meet his mum, or when, after they're divorced, he's looking after his little baby daughter late at night. These scenes are preposterous, really: devoid of psychological truth or authentic interaction. The set-pieces that require a world to be conjured up on stage - the courtroom or the night- club -are paper-thin. Too often the houselights go up and we feel the show's energy haemorrhaging away.

Lenny was first staged five years after Bruce's death. Three years after
that Bob Fosse directed Dustin Hoffman in the movie. This black- and-white version is a treat. There's a clear, controlled aesthetic (it's beautifully shot), tightly organised material and a fervid pulse to the narrative. You enter the world of Lenny Bruce. The West End revival has none of this attentiveness.

We are presented with a ragbag of styles. In the courtroom scenes, for
instance, the rest of the cast wear masks as if in a Greek tragedy. The
jazz band are on stage. William Dudley's set has a catch-all flavour to it. Glass screens form the walls of the courtroom and back projections gives us the exterior shots of neon signs and nightclubs. The costumes look as if they've been borrowed from a period musical. If I was Eddie Izzard I'd cut out all the biographical stuff and just go out there and do the routines as a homage. The rest is beneath him.

The Daily Telegraph 10th August 1999

THE alarming thing when you listen to old Lenny Bruce records is just
how unshocking, and how unfunny, the legendary comedian now seems.

This was the drug-fuelled stand-up who reduced sophisticated audiences
to helpless hysteria and who was constantly in trouble with the law on
obscenity raps. Yet if he appeared on late-night TV today he wouldn' t
create a ripple of unease.

There is, however, no doubt that Bruce mapped out new comic terrain. In
an age of bland conformity in the America of the late Fifties and early
Sixties, Bruce defiantly tackled the thorny subjects of race, religion
and sex and more than 30 years after his death he is still venerated as
the godfather of alternative comedy.

It looked a terrific idea to cast Eddie Izzard, in my view the finest
British comic of his generation, as the man who showed the way to
today's young stand-ups. I have to report however that though Izzard
gives an intermittently compelling performance, Peter Hall's production
is a lumbering disappointment.

Much of the trouble stems from Julian Barry's script, first seen in 1971
and now showing its age. We begin at the moment of Bruce's death from a
drugs overdose, aged 40 (like Elvis he died unheroically on the
lavatory) before the action dissolves into a dream sequence in which the
comedian tries to justify his allegedly obscene shows to a judge and a
court of law.

Then there are the flashbacks, in which we meet the wife and aunt who
brought Lenny up, the stripper he married and who turned him on to hard
drugs, and follow his progress from the sleazy dives to the big-time,
followed by the endless arrests that eventually destroyed his career.

Unfortunately there is remarkably little vim in the writing, and all the
supporting characters remain crude caricatures, though I have to admit
that Elizabeth Berkley revived my flagging attention with a terrific
strip routine as Lenny's wife.

With this agreeably gratuitous exception, however, all eyes are
naturally on Izzard as Lenny, who also contrives to spend a remarkable
amount of time without his clothes on. But though Izzard does his
damnedest, he fails to make much of a case for the dead comedian.

There's a key moment in the script when Lenny Bruce confesses that all
his humour is based on "destruction and despair". Izzard's own comic
style, however, is based on an inherent niceness and dotty flights of
surreal fantasy. As a result you never feel the actor is in tune with
the character, and the frisson of danger that must have enlivened
Bruce's performances is fatally absent.

For without the danger, the sense of a man recklessly breaking taboos,
Lenny Bruce's material often seems hideously unamusing. There is
something self-advertising about his social conscience. Bruce certainly
didn't deserve the martyrdom he received at the hands of the
Establishment, but you can't help wishing that just occasionally his
routines were funny as well as right-on.

Izzard is a chunky chap, who lacks Bruce's lean look, and his American
accent is far from secure. He is intermittently touching in Bruce' s
drug-addled decline, but throughout I found myself wishing I was
watching one of Izzard's own winning performances rather than his flawed
impersonation of the far less entertaining Lenny.

Evening Standard Hot Tickets 22 July 1999

Eddie gets dramatic

The hair is tomboy-cropped, bleached-out orange. The shoes are unisex trainers. The jacket is a butch black-leather drape. Today Eddie Izzard, self-styled transvestite, is unvarnished and low-heeled. OK, he's wearing minimal make-up, but only because he's on a photo shoot in a blacked-out East End studio. He might almost be in civvies until he gets under the lights, grabs a microphone and rocks off to the side, cigarette trailing from left lower lip. The smile fades to deadpan and Izzard goes into the zone.

He's thinking about Lenny Bruce, the ground-breaking comedian who incurred the wrath of middle-American prejudice and paid the ultimate sacrifice in 1966. He was found cold, blue and naked in a bathroom with only a syringe for company. Heroin? There was no autopsy. Record producer Phil Spector said Lenny had 'died from an overdose of police'. In his foreword to Bruce's autobiography, How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, critic Kenneth Tynan described Bruce as 'the man who went down on America's conscience... we miss him, and the nerve-fraying, jazz-digging, pain-hating, sex-loving, lie-shunning, bomb-loathing life he represents'.

Eddie Izzard is about to play Bruce on stage. Portraying the man he calls 'the godfather of alternative stand-up' is a risk for him Ð but he's always enjoyed a challenge Ð ever since he rode a unicycle around Leicester Square while free-associating his 'bollocks on top of more bollocks and nonsense' for non-plussed passers-by.

'I've been looking for a good theatrical role for ages,' he muses, over cheap white-paper-bag ham sandwiches. 'Stand-up comes with the "Oh you can't really act" baggage. This is like a comedy with dramatic edge, which I need. I phoned the director Peter Halland, said, "I want this part," and he said, "Good. We want you." The original scriptwriter, Julian Barry, suggested they check me out. Americans detect a bit of Bruce in what I do. It's because of the riffing and the chunks of Thespian I talk. History with a spin. Obviously he riffed way more than me. At the end of his career he wasn't looking for comedy anymore, he was just reading out the court transcripts of his obscenity busts. He was saying things that were even more important than making people laugh.'

Bruce did for comedy what Bob Dylan did for folk music. In post-beatnik America, he didn't push the envelope, he delivered the letterbomb. 'He got nailed on the swearing,' Izzard reckons, 'when the stuff about religion, drugs and sex was far more potent. I think there was a conspiracy to get him in California and New York and it worked because he ran out of money to pay his legal bills. The key to his notoriety was his profanity rather than him using words like cocksucker. He became "dirty Lenny" whereas now he'd be "angry Lenny".'

When this play, Lenny, first opened on Broadway in 1971, it was hailed as a 'dynamite stick of theatre'. Of the film that followed, directed by Bob Fosse, Dustin Hoffman said, 'This is the best part I've ever had.' Izzard concurs: 'Yeah, he was perfect, being Jewish and small and dark. It'll be harder for me. Maybe I'll do it in Glaswegian. No, I love doing American and if I'm terrible I won't be going to Broadway. And I really want to go to Broadway.'

The idea of an Englishman in New York, bringing it all back home, appeals to Izzard. He quotes Jonathan Miller on Bruce's 1962 appearance at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in London, saying that Beyond The Fringe was a satirical pinprick, but Bruce's act was a bloodbath. It was so peppered with outrageous references to then verboten topics such as VD, cancer and the guilt-free joys of masturbation that Lenny's work permit was later blocked by the Home Secretary. 'There was a real social and political sense to what he was saying,' says Eddie. 'That's why I think he created alternative comedy, something that was non-gag-orientated but completely irreverent.'

After Lenny, the deluge. A blizzard of Izzard over the next few months Ð but it's all work, no personal revelations. In his autobiography, Dress To Kill, Eddie entirely evades divulging affairs of the heart. He doesn't skirt around the skirts. And he kisses and tells about stealing lipstick from Boots in Bexhill. He admits 'comedy is a good way of getting girls' and we know he's a sexy dyslexic who likes women, but significant others have not been spotted. 'I could say, "Oh, I'm shagging a duck," or whatever, but the personal stuff that papers thrive on doesn't interest me. Even the transvestite thing is boring now because I've done that to death. It's public domain, who cares? Maybe if I went back in and came out again, but I don't want to be like what's-his-name in Jamiroquai and his girlfriend. I don't want to be in that place. I'm more like Daniel Day Lewis who's famous for talking about nothing. And then one day he got married.' Which is not to say that Izzard lives a reclusive life on the Harrow Road Ð although he does admit, 'I spend a lot of time on my computer. I've just got the complete Encyclopedia Britannica and I'm going to learn the lot. I want to know about everything. I'm an obsessive.'

He's also damn busy.There are four films in the pipeline. In The Criminal he plays a forensic scientist with an RAF moustache and a raincoat. It's a large cameo. 'Think The Fugitive meets North By North West. I die in that one. Which is how I judge my parts. Doesn't matter how serious the role, it's whether I die and do running.' In The Mystery Men, he does both. It's a comedy about crap superheroes which he didn't much fancy doing, but his agent made him because it was in Hollywood and featured Ben Stiller, Paul Rubens and Greg Kinnear.

'I've always been confused about the differences between Los Angeles and Hollywood,' he ruminates. 'If you say you're filming in Hollywood, people go, "Aaah!" If you say you're in LA they go, "Oh". Anyway, this time I play a character called Tony Pompadour with a huge Brian Setzer quiff. I wore funky clothes and I got to meet Tom Waits.' Again it's a pivotal cameo. So when does he get to carry a film? 'I'm not quite in that situation yet. I'm wheedling my way through, but I'm not ready. The trouble with films is they come back to haunt you when you've forgotten all about them. So far I've been lucky. When things have gone wrong Ð say The Avengers Ð it wasn't my fault. Of course, if they've gone all right, I slipstream in casually and say, "Oh yes, I was in that," and people say, "Good, well done, have this sausage."'

His two most recent roles exercise him more. In Circus, a gangster film set in Brighton, he explores his darker side. And in The Shadow Of The Vampire he plays opposite John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. 'I'm the dickhead who goes to the vampire and says, "I've got this house, a really nice property, I think you'll like it. Oh, what big teeth you've got. Oh, what a big castle. Hey, how do I get out of here!" I'm a Twenties estate agent, basically. I should have the equivalent of a German mobile phone, a can on a string. Funny how in vampire films no one will go near the castle except the postman. "Yeah, I'll take it on horseback. No problem."' In any case, he wants to sink his teeth into lots more films. Celluloid is his obsession. 'They're just too much fun to pass on. Film is what I wanted to do when I was a kid. What could be better than sitting round a blazing torch swapping stories with John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. In Luxembourg.'

As he gets into his car to go to a meeting, I ask if he ever takes a holiday. 'Not very often. My dad used to say to me, "You don't deserve a holiday because you're doing exactly the kind of work you like to do." I suppose that's stuck with me. Mind you, he did used to say that when I was doing absolutely f*** all.'

As he prepares West End stage, Eddie Izzard tells BRYAN APPLEYARD why the American firebrand remains the 'godfather of alternative stand-up'
Sunday Times 18 July 1999

The king of comedy

Eddie Izzard was born in Yemen to English parents; Lenny Bruce was a New York Jew. Izzard is a transvestite; Bruce was not. Izzard is nice; Bruce was not. Izzard likes to look on the bright side; Bruce did not. Izzard is a surrealist; Bruce was a satirist. It would be hard to find two people with less in common, except for one thing: Izzard is the finest stand-up comic of his day, and so was Bruce. Which is why Sir Peter Hall's decision to cast Izzard as Bruce in his new production of Julian Barry's play Lenny is, in spite of everything, a brave and honourable act. It is a statement that, across the generations, the uniquely weird, high-pressure art of stand-up unites more than it divides. Izzard - the stocky, languid embodiment of a fine and exotic English whimsy - can, indeed, become Bruce - the thin, nervy expression of Jewish fatalism and anger. Izzard wanted the part badly. "I heard it was being done and I knew this was the part I'd been looking for. It brought together drama and comedy. I talked to a bunch of people, I had to get to Peter Hall. I knew how to bullshit my way through. I said: 'I can do this, let me do it.' And he said: 'Well, we want you to do it.' " In fact, Barry, having seen an Izzard video, had already suggested him to Hall. "I wanted to do it with a stand-up comedian," says Hall, "because stand-up is not acting and I don't think an actor could do it. That thing about sharing yourself with an audience - it's the most exposed thing in the theatre." Bruce - "The godfather of alternative stand-up," says Izzard - exposed himself by exposing what he saw as the obscene iniquities that lay concealed beneath the smooth surface of America in the early 1960s. ("I'm just pissing on velvet," he said.) He discussed sex, religion and politics in ways that made him a hero of the nascent counterculture, twice had him expelled from Britain for being a threat to public order and finally had him brutally prosecuted in the US for obscenity. He was unhinged - his last performances ended with unfunny, rambling accounts of his court case - but inspired. He abandoned jokes, inventing instead the angry sideways take on life that was to dominate the energetic British stand-up scene of the 1980s. He died of an overdose in 1966. Some said he was killed by police persecution but, in truth, he was killed by the ruthless nerve-shredding demands of stand-up. The height of his success was in New York in the early 1960s. He appeared, briefly, in Britain at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in Soho and his work was spread further by a few records. But his real fame came after his death, when he was embraced as a hero of the alternative culture that flowered after 1967. He was the first man to establish comedy as the new rock'n'roll and he was the model for every young, angry or just weird stand-up who came after. Bruce is the patron saint of stand-up. The infinitely gentler Izzard doesn't do jokes, either. He only ever knew one - When is a door not a door? When it's ajar - and he simply can't get into the dynamic of using other people's stories and delivering punch lines. And, like Bruce, like every good stand-up, he exposes himself, but through life rather than satire. He admits his audience into the child-like banalities and wonders of his mind. His mother died when he was six and, byseven, he had formed the conviction that he must become an actor. "It was desperation for the love of an audience. When there's no love coming, you thirst for it." But there was no obvious route to stardom, so he moved fairly soberly through his schooldays and ended up reading accounting and financial management with mathematics - "It was the longest course name I could find. I thought it would look impressive" - at Sheffield. That lasted a year, then, having been inspired by Monty Python, he started doing sketch shows at the Edinburgh Festival. "I failed and failed. I was confused. I'd played my big card. I just thought I'd do that Python thing and get into TV." Then he failed again when, for two years, he did street shows in London with a student friend, Rob Ballard. Finally, he realised he had to do stand-up. London was, at the time, becoming the world capital of the art. "I'd never considered it. I'd always admired Billy Connolly, but I was too scared to do it myself. I had developed this 'me' character on the street and I could talk to an audience. I started trying to write stand-up stuff. But it was very difficult so I just went ahead and booked a gig. That failed." He worked earnestly at his style in comedy workshops - not good training, as everybody laughs at you in the hope you will laugh at them. Then, one day, he took apart a sketch he had written for two people about a man who was addicted to breakfast cereals. This was pure autobiography: Izzard loves cereals, adores Twixes and mistrusts fruit - pears, in his world, spitefully stay rock-hard for days and then suddenly go rotten when you're not looking. He rearranged the sketch for one person, did it himself and it worked. He had found the style that was to blossom into its mature mix of surrealism, inspired banality, history lessons and religious and political speculation, all tied together by strange, dreamlike associations. Jesus, for example, could not run away from the Romans because he wore flip-flops; when Spock peered into that scanner on the deck of the Starship Enterprise he was secretly eating a Twix; Hannibal's elephants were good skiers - it's the momentum - and Noah, sawing wood for his Ark, is mysteriously metamorphosed into a man punching a baboon in the face. "I found" says Izzard, " I could talk stupid bollocks 'til the cows came home . . . it's bullshit but it sort of works." Meanwhile, there was the transvestism. Since he regularly appeared on the stage and in the street dressed in women's clothes, he felt he needed to explain himself. He took this quite a long way, successfully proscecuting some lads who beat him up. But the key distinction he wanted to make was that he was not a drag queen; he was heterosexual, a male lesbian. "I really had trouble explaining this. I'm a pervert by most social definitions all around the world. So I just called myself an executive transvestite and everybody said, 'Oh, that's fine, then', and it was all right." And so he was, by the 1990s, a stand-up star, an exotic, heavily made-up cult. He had built a wall in his head to keep the fear at bay and he could confidently control big audiences for two hours or more. Yet he was not conventionally famous because he refused to do television. He was a TV but he wasn't on TV. It was all part of his continuing plan to become an actor. "If you do comedy on TV you pick up all this baggage. I mean imagine Paul Merton or John Cleese playing Hamlet. You can't because television has fixed them in this comedy thing. Mel Gibson had all this action hero baggage when he played Hamlet - but he was just trying to drag this career thing across to something else." But then: "To use a female empowerment term, I hit a glass ceiling. I could do all these shows with two or three thousand people every night of the year but I still couldn't reach as big an audience as I would with, say, an eight-minute slot on the Clive James Show." So, as he broke on to the West End stage in 1993 and, subsequently, film acting, Izzard began to trickle on to television - via Have I Got News For You?, numerous chat shows and even Question Time. He had become an actor so he now could afford the television. But, though he releases videos of his shows, he still does not do his full-scale comedy work for television. He is, without doubt, the finest flowering of the British stand-up comedy wave that began, heavily influenced by Lenny Bruce, in West End clubs in 1979. That wave, he is convinced, is as strong as ever. He has counted 85 comedy clubs in London compared to five each in New York and Los Angeles. And now drama and media studies courses at a number of British universities are offering courses in stand-up. The art is being institutionalised as a national asset. "In America," says Izzard, "the best just get snapped up by film and TV. We don't have industries of that size, so the best stay on the circuit." And he is, again without doubt, the most sympathetic star it is possible to imagine. "There is a sweetness about him," says Hall. Izzard works conscientiously at his craft and draws love from his audiences. He is, unlike almost every other comedian, always positive. "I'd rather be pro than anti. Of course, railing against things is an easier comic tool, but I want to create, build things. I'm positive about politics - I don't say all politicians are bastards. And I think Europe can work, it's a great idea after 2,500 years of war. But where's the comic spin on that? It took me ages to get there. I'm quite Buddhist in my approach. I don't hate people." Izzard overturns the old wisdom that comedy is all about cruelty and humiliation. For him it is about strangeness, puzzlement - what was Spock always looking at? - fantasy and fleeting incongruity - why is that dog food called Cesar and why don't Americans pronounce the "h" in herbs? It is about the fact that God probably would talk like James Mason and it is about his own compulsive autodidacticism - he uses a CD-Rom of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to fill his act with a startling range of documentary material. The theme is clear - this is comedy that springs from the perennial truth that normality always evades the normal imagination. And Izzard is, above all, normal. "I'm normal and boring, this is my problem. I'm not windswept and interesting. Some people at school you hate because they're so f***ing interesting and everybody fancies them and wants to shag them. But I'm just boring. That's probably why I'm keen to do things that scare me - like stand-up, or doing the whole thing in French in Paris or going to America. I suppose it comes from being a transvestite." Normal or not, he is a strange man to meet. In black T-shirt and black jeans - no make-up this time - he smokes his way through a lot of Silk Cuts as he tries earnestly to answer my questions. He is very proud of having subjected himself to intense self-analysis and this keeps emerging as very conclusive summaries of his own motives - the death of his mother crops up again and again. Yet I felt, at the end, that I knew this Izzard no better than the Izzard I had watched on the stage and on video. And that, I suppose, is the point. Modern, post-Brucean stand-up comedy uses the comic's life as its raw material. Inevitably, therefore, the life and the art become one. I cannot get to know an Eddie Izzard who isn't a stand-up because that is what he always is - and always will be, however good he gets at acting. "I'll do stand-up 'til I die. It's just too good. You've got to do it all the time or the fear comes back . . ." In Bruce and, latterly, Izzard, stand-up has moved on from jokes and clowning to become an existential continuum. Like thought itself, like Samuel Beckett's "eternal quaqua", it just chatters on, evading punch lines and climaxes, evading death. "Stuff endings!" cries Izzard as if - no, because - his life depended on it.

Sunday Observer 25th July 1999

The Jesus Christ of stand-up

If it wasn't for Lenny Bruce, there would be no modern comedy, says Eddie Izzard, who takes the title role in a revival of Lenny, a graphic portrait of the original foul-mouthed comic

Jay Rayner
Sunday July 25, 1999

The managers of London's Queen's Theatre are desperate to give Eddie Izzard bars of soap. They keep knocking on the door of his dressing-room, with these pristine bars of Imperial Leather clutched in their hands as welcoming gifts. Izzard eyes the bars. 'Dirty, dirty Lenny,' he says, in the clipped American accent he has perfected to play Lenny Bruce, arguably the first alternative comedian, who died of a drugs overdose in 1966. 'But first I've got to get clean to be dirty.'

Bruce could be very dirty, although not in any way that could ever be helped by soap. ' Time magazine called him Dirty Lenny and he hated it,' says Izzard, who has been doing his reading. Still, you know what the headline writers meant. Bruce used the kind of language way back in the Fifties that even in the Nineties gets bludgeoned with asterisks. He talked about cocksuckers and motherfuckers, about niggers and wops and kikes. He talked about the kind of stuff that makes you slam back in your seat, rigid with shock, horror and surprise. He talked about loveless couples who found a bond through their shared bout of venereal disease. He did material about white liberals entertaining 'their coloured friends'.

'Children ought to watch pornographic movies,' he once said. 'It's healthier than learning about sex from Hollywood.' And this long before 1963, when sexual intercourse was invented.

'The point about Bruce is that he wants us to be shocked but by the right things,' wrote the late Kenneth Tynan, this paper's drama critic, in the Sixties. 'Not by four-letter words, which violate only convention, but by want and deprivation, which violate human dignity.' Accordingly, Bruce spent the back-end of his drug-ravaged career either awaiting trial on obscenity charges or sitting in a courtroom fighting them.

The casting of Izzard in the title role of Lenny, a play about the comedian by Julian Barry, first performed in New York in 1970 and now revived in a production directed by Sir Peter Hall, makes perfect sense. Sure, there's none of the seething violence in Izzard, that acid need to burn the senses, but there is a similarity in style. Like Bruce, Izzard approaches his material as a jazz musician approaches a melody, firing off on riffs that barely cling to the original theme but which somehow always manage to return to them.

'Lenny Bruce was more nihilistic than I am,' Izzard says, sticking to the impressive American accent. (He has a rehearsal later in the afternoon and can't see a reason to drop it now.) 'He was pointing out the bullshit. If there was something that was shit around he was pointing it out.' But, he says, there are still those things in common, a willingness by both of them to slam together 'religion, history, politics, to shake it all down and to see what comes out'. As Izzard sees it, Bruce was the first jazz comedian, the one who had to exist so that modern comedy could happen. Recently, a new slogan has gone up on the posters advertising the play. It reads: 'He is the Jesus Christ of stand-up. He died so alternative comedy could live.' And then, after reciting it, Izzard adds: 'Everyone can say motherfucker because of him.' That isn't on the posters.

Izzard has cut his hair for the role and dyed it black but this performance will not be an impression. That would be an impossibility. Bruce was a slim-hipped slip of a thing and Izzard is chunkier with big, beefy forearms and wide thighs. Instead, he says, he's trying to capture 'the essence, the spirit'. 'Lenny was a kid when he got into showbusiness. He wanted to get to the top. When he started out, it was really standard stuff. Then he started saying what was really on his mind and he saw that people reacted. He saw it was good way to get known and to make a statement.'

What Izzard will be doing, though, is working on Bruce's material. At various stages in the show, he has to come up front and do improvised stand-up, built around transcripts of the original act. Izzard acknowledges that making this work has demanded as much from Peter Hall as from him; as a director, Hall has always been wedded to the text. 'I've done David Mamet so I, too, understand about doing every dot and every comma. I know how to do that thing,' Izzard says.

This, however, is an entirely different proposition from his previous acting roles, a real synergy of actor and stand-up: 'Peter's come halfway to me and I've come halfway to him. I will definitely rap. I will have a piece where I know where I'm driving to but I'll be able to come off that piece. I do want the audience to have a sense that they don't know where it's going. The thing is I could drop some of my stuff into his stuff and people wouldn't notice. And then people might mistake his stuff for my stuff, because he did lots of really surreal material. I want to make it live.'

So what time is the curtain meant to come down each night? Izzard grins. 'I don't know. We've had a bit of trouble working it out. I don't know how long each half is meant to be.' These are things he has to deal with before the opening night next month.

There is, of course, no guarantee that a London audience will get what this show is about. In 1970, when it first played on Broadway, Bruce was only four years dead. He had become a symbol of the counter culture. To mention his work, to say you listened to the recordings of his shows or that you had read his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, was to identify yourself with a particular kind of cool. That can't apply here. Most of the audience may never have heard of Bruce, let alone listened to his recordings. Izzard accepts that this is true. But, he says: 'People in the media or the film industry, they know about him or at least they would claim to know about him. That kind of word of mouth will give the show the push it needs.' Either way, Izzard is not intimidated. 'Anything that scares me but is positive I'll go towards,' he says. It's like the first time he went on stage as an actor, or when he came out as a transvestite. Both were a challenge and both were worth doing and so is this. In any case it's only for a 12-week run. The show closes on a Saturday. The very next evening, he starts a nationwide tour as himself in his home town of Bexhill-on-Sea. He'll be going back to do the very thing that most qualifies him to play Lenny Bruce.

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