Contemporary Authors

• Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill ( memoir) Virgin (London, England), 1998
• Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens Blue Rider Press (New York, NY), 2017

1. Believe me : a memoir of love, death, and jazz chickens LCCN 2017008493 Type of material Book Personal name Izzard, Eddie, author. Main title Believe me : a memoir of love, death, and jazz chickens / Eddie Izzard, with Laura Zigman. Published/Produced New York : Blue Rider Press, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780399175831 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PN2598.I99 A3 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Eddie Izzard : dress to kill LCCN 99232625 Type of material Book Personal name Izzard, Eddie. Main title Eddie Izzard : dress to kill / words by Eddie Izzard and David Quantick ; photography by Steve Double. Published/Created London : Virgin, 1998. Description 160 p. : col. ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 1852277637 CALL NUMBER PN2598.I99 A3 1998 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Eddie Izzard - http://www.eddieizzard.com/early-years

  QUOTE:
  Dad was a fifties hippy with very short hair. He wrote essays on communism and stuff when he was sixteen. He joined BP as a filing clerk, not really knowing what he wanted to do. One of the first things he did was redesign the whole filing system so no-one knew where anything was except him, which I thought was a good move.
  I was a hustler. I would sell crayons in the school yard. 'You need crayons. What if you get stranded on a desert island? How are you going to write a message? Crayons.'

  In which Eddie provides an account of his childhood in his own words.
  Hailed as the foremost stand up of his generation. Star of stage and screen. Tireless supporter of charity. Runner. Political campaigner. Fashion icon. Human. Eddie Izzard is all of these things and more. But what of his formative years?

  EDDIE: I was born in February '62 in South Yemen. Dad was a fifties hippy with very short hair. He wrote essays on communism and stuff when he was sixteen. He joined BP as a filing clerk, not really knowing what he wanted to do. One of the first things he did was redesign the whole filing system so no-one knew where anything was except him, which I thought was a good move.

  He ended up taking this post in Aden, which is a bit like saying, 'I'm going to the moon.' It's still miles away, but this was in the fifties. Aden was a British colony at the time; BP had a refinery there and they built a town, roads and a hospital. My mother went out later when she'd decided she was going to be a nurse in Aden. So you had two people separately saying, 'I'm going to go to the fucking moon.' So then they met and got married and I was the second kid to come along.

  I have an older brother. His name is Mark: he's a couple of years older than me. We've got a cinefilm of him running round playing football then poking me in the eye. There's a great little scene of him, me and my mother, he keeps poking me in the eye and my mother keeps pulling his hand away...And my dad's in other bits with the moustache he had at the time. Very 30-year-old. We left Aden in 1963. There was a revolution once we left...I've got to go back to Aden. My dad's going to take us and show us everything.

  Northern Ireland, Teeth, Toenails
  We went to Northern Ireland and we were there until '67 and that was great. BP had a refinery in Belfast and we used to go down there and hammer away on the electric typewriters. That was space age stuff to me. There must have been underlying political stuff happening but I was totally oblivious to it. I was going to primary school and drinking these third-pints of milk and the biscuits you'd get at break times and just drawing pictures of our house, Mum, Dad and stuff, and being in a gang and throwing mud balls at passing cars. Everything was being built then and they were constantly building bungalows, so we used to climb all over the roofs of them and pour water in all the cement mixers so it would all harden.

  Go cartIt was an immensely age-spread gang, from four to eleven or twelve. It was just the kids who lived on that street - Ashford Drive in Bangor. Some of them ended up joining the army. But it was a great time. And my mum was alive. I go back there and I remember it all. Asking for sixpence for ice-cream. Running like an idiot and then falling over and smashing my whole front tooth. There was blood and stuff and a lot of yelling but it was actually quite a neat tooth, with a dunce's hat-shaped root coming out of the top of it. I kept it and gave it to my brother as a cufflink from a Plasticraft set, along with a toenail. This is how sick I could be. A bench had fallen on his foot, and a similar bench had hit my foot several months before, and so we had matching smashed toes. I don't know what happened to my toenail but his was preserved in this box so I thought, I'll put these two, my tooth and his toenail, in cufflinks and give them to him as Christmas presents. He was horrified. I couldn't work out why. I think he's still got them. They're these big chunky Plasticraft, blue-based things, one with a toenail and one with a tooth. I now think it's a work of Dadaist brilliance but my artistic career began and ended there with the horrified expression on my brother's face.

  South Wales, Cycling, Little Chef
  So, yeah. Northern Ireland. I left in '67 and moved to South Wales, near Swansea - a place called Skewn. That was very different to the essential green and rain and running around Northern Ireland. I went back when I was 14. I said, 'I'm going to cycle from Sussex to Wales. I want to lose weight.' But my dad gave me some money and a Little Chef map, which was the worst map to give me. I cycled from Little Chef to Little Chef, eating the maple syrup and ice-cream and orange fruities at petrol stations and going to farms and saying, 'Can I sleep in your field?' They'd say, 'Yeah. Here's a bit of water,' and I'd get woken up by cows who were just looking into the tent scaring the shit out of me.

  When I cycled back the smells were so distinct they immediately hit me. The industrial smells of South Wales are incredibly strong. And there was that bit of the A48 as you go along from Cardiff along the M4 - it used to be motorway, motorway, motorway, then traffic lights. Traffic lights?! There's traffic lights on the motorway! It just changed to an A road for a stretch then back to a motorway.

  But my mum died when I was there. March '68. So that was a killer, and rejigged everything. Before my mum died, they decided that me and my brother should go off to these boarding schools, because I think my dad had just got a career going. Having gone to Aden and whatever, he'd been promoted.

  My gran used to work in a biscuit factory and cleaned houses and my granddad drove buses, so that was a very working-class background. They were from north Bexhill, Sidley. I've gone back and done benefits there. No hot water, no bathroom, baths in front of the fire, an outside loo, that's what my dad grew up in. He decided me and my brother should go to boarding schools. A single-parent male, that's how you keep it all going.

  Boarding School, Crayons, Radio
  So I was six when I went off to boarding school. There was a four-year-old kid there I felt sorry for: he was still wetting the bed. I think that my child-like character that appears in my stand-up now was locked off at six. But my brother and I were both there, which was better than just one of us. It was down in Porthcawl, a place called St John's School. It's like a desert island. There's beaches down there: it's very duney. I actually went back there and played a street performing gig as part of a Labour Party get-together outdoor something or other. Porthcawl had this funfair and a whole lot of stuff I didn't even know about. There's a Butlinsy feel to it which I found quite surprising because I didn't remember that when I was there.

  Brothers at the beach

  I was a hustler. I would sell crayons in the school yard. 'You need crayons. What if you get stranded on a desert island? How are you going to write a message? Crayons.' I'm actually quite fascinated in a very sad way by retail. I wanted to run a shop. You used to be able to get a little shop with those Hornby train sets and in the window it had all these things like Kellogg's cornflakes and tins of soup and stuff. You could look through the door and there was stuff happening inside...I wanted to sit in that shop. I like supermarkets. I just like hanging around the aisles, and new things going up - 'What would I like today? Ooh one of those...' It's a bit like Spinal Tap: 'Shoe shop... I could run one of those.'

  We had a radio at school in Wales. I remember hearing Tom Jones' Delilah on it and Those Were The Days by Mary Hopkins, and it was a bit like hearing it from Mars. It was an old radio of my dad's from Aden I'd borrowed, so you'd tune in and you'd hear sounds from outside.

  At school you would sometimes get to go to this church on a Sunday, and when you're six it seemed like going miles, even though it's just down the road. And there was this village playground with a door with a grating in it, which had scary steps going down to a well, where the devil lived, we all thought. You looked down into it and thought, where the fuck does that go? And there were these dunes and a caravan park which we'd walk through which would take us down to the sea, which was kind of cold and chilly, and there were lots of these yellow plants growing on the dunes which had caterpillars on them.

  We never saw anyone in the caravan site, because we were never there in the holiday season. There was a locked-up centre at the caravan site, with arcade games in it. And there was a Dalek in there that you were supposed to get into and move around in. We had these horrible sandwiches and what they called lemonade which wasn't lemonade, it was some cheap stuff, and you'd have to bury your sandwiches in the sand because they were disgusting.

  Horrible Food, Lazenby, Sack Race
  The food was awful, and I had a real food problem, a real basic palate. My brother was eating Indian food and I could only eat potatoes. That's why I wanted to be in the army because they were always peeling potatoes and I thought, well, I like potatoes, so... And this school served macaroni with warm milk, I mean, what the fuck was that? I've never seen that since.

  And the best meal they had - they would take you down to the swimming baths on a Thursday and you'd come back and have sausage and chips, and that was fantastic. There were some meals that you just looked forward to...they had compulsory tea drinking and I hated tea. But sausage and chips was the one meal I could eat.

  We went on these school outings when I was at school in Eastbourne. I remember seeing On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I really rate the Australian Bond, George Lazenby. I love the film he's in; I am alone in that. But I challenge anyone to look back at it and say what is so bad about it. The fight sequences are great - they put amazing sounds in, like they're fighting with planks of wood. These really heightened noises. Diana Rigg is fantastic, I like the skiing, I like Telly Savalas, I like the music... I knew 'We've Got All The Time In The World' could be number one. We used to get points, a school merit system, and they had sections. Everyone was in different groups and whichever group won the most points got an outing, and we'd win it year after year, and every year I didn't know what was going on. It was nothing to do with me, but every year I was just going on these outings, thinking, cool... but I haven't really helped with this. On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the film on one of these trips.

  Sack raceWhen I was seven I entered the sack race on sports day. My dad said, 'Put your feet in the corners and just run.' So I did and went steaming down the track. There's this picture of me going through the tape going, 'Yeahhh,' fucking leagues ahead of the next guy... The next guy had just changed from his leaping style to a running style, because the sacks were too big and you could get a full stride in. I won a blue football. So that was me and my dad working together.

  Dad, Sidley, Searchlight
  My dad's good. I think we're quite similar. We're a bit emotionally compressed; we don't get too elated by things because we've had bad stuff happen and more shit could be just around the corner. But we don't get too depressed either. We quite like pootling around but try to be more windswept and interesting, as Billy Connolly always said.

  Now we work together sometimes in the community centre in Sidley, the place where he grew up. My grandmother helped start it in about 1949. She taught me and my brother when we were at the kindergarten there. It's in Bexhill, East Sussex, where Spike Milligan was stationed during the war. He was on a lookout on top of Galley Hill, waiting for the Germans to come. I sold ice-creams at a kiosk at the bottom of the hill, and I used to cycle around looking for the places where he was stationed. The De La Warr Pavilion, is where I sold sausage, egg and chips and cups of tea to old ladies: Spike played there, and I ended up playing there.

  I did a stand-up gig in Sidley. I took a Hollywood searchlight, like the ones used to sweep the sky for bombers. The last time these things were in Sidley was in 1942, wartime. We got permission - but the police were phoning up, going 'What the fuck's going on?' - and everyone was driving in from ten, twelve miles each way because they could see these lights in the sky. People kept driving up and saying 'What's happening? Can we come?' It's nice working with my dad. He's treasurer at the community centre.

  Eastbourne, Football, Lego
  In 1969 we left Wales and went back to live in Bexhill. We went to school in Eastbourne - again, it was this boarding school thing. The first one was called St. Bede's, right at the foot of the South Downs. The Downs has steep banks with loads of bomb craters because the British planes coming back from missions would jettison their bombs on the Downs because they couldn't land with a bomb load, something like that, I don't know. We used to play in the craters.

  I used to play a lot of football. At that time I lived for football. I just ran my arse off, playing left half and then right half. I was in the first team. I wasn't the best or the most gifted but I was good when the ball would go past our goalie and I'd be there to head it off the line. And when the guy was running ahead with the ball and he was bringing his foot back to kick it, I'd just put my foot in and knock it away from him. I'd do those things. I couldn't kick the ball in the goal to save my life. I was scared of getting up there in case I tried and missed in an open-goal situation and then everyone would kill me. So I just used to do the good pass for someone else to knock it in. They used to read out the names of the people in the first team in school assembly on match day - 'OK, get your kit and off you go' - and you'd stand up and walk out. It was great. I loved that.

  The football teamBut the second school in Eastbourne didn't fucking play football. What a crap decision. They played rugby, hockey and cricket and in the sixth form you were given an option of doing football. It was treated like pottery or martial arts. So I gave up on sport really. I thought it was stupid not playing football. My brother had already gone to the school, so I knew about it. You accept it.

  At university, I thought, hey, I'll get back into playing football, but I was clearly five years out of practise. I was treated like shit by the people who played, because I couldn't kick a ball anymore. And it was no good with other sports. Cricket, the ball always tried to hit me. Hockey I liked but some guys could just look at the ball and fbam! - shoot it somewhere. I worked really hard to try and get good with the backs of hockey sticks and stuff but I couldn't hit it like the best guys. I was in the football first XI at thirteen, though. Played 14, won 11, drew one, lost two. I almost played for my town. I was a reserve on the team. Eastbourne v. Seaford. I could have played.

  My dad tells us that the 1966 World Cup was on television, and he was saying to us, 'You've got to watch,' and me and my brother were saying, 'No'. 'You've got to watch it's the World Cup - it's 3-2 - it's 4-2...' And we were still saying, 'No' and sticking bits of lego in our ears.

  Acting, Clarinet, Beauty
  I wanted to be a professional footballer. I didn't think I was going to make it, because I didn't seem to be that good, but I really loved it. I know people don't equate football with transvestism but the fact is, there's got to be a lot of football players and football fans and people in the army, navy, airforce or driving forklift trucks who are TVs, because it's male tomboy. It's kind of like, male lesbians because we all fancy women as well. But if you embrace it, you get certain gifts from the feminine side.

  ClarinetI tried to get into plays at school but I couldn't because they were convinced I was crap. Maybe I was. I would audition but never get a role. I learned the clarinet for the wrong reasons. I was trying to play the piano but ended up playing this clarinet and I had to be in the school band. They put on a musical, Oliver! Or something, and I had to play the bloody clarinet. One kid at school's dad was a semi-pro actor and my big treat was I would hand him his hat and his cane. It was my big 'My God, I'm almost in the play' thing.

  So from the age of seven I really wanted to act and I did really weird things to try to get into it. I did Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The choir at the school was doing it, and I wasn't in the choir, so I hung around them and lifted things and pushed things. And eventually I was in it, and I even managed to get a solo line out of it. We did a version of Beauty and the Beast when I was seven and I was a street urchin. The street urchins combined had one line - 'Oh Beauty, don't go' - which, when the line came up, I used to say really quickly before everyone: 'OhBeautyDon'tGo.' All the other kids would go, 'Oh...he's said it.' So I would make it my own line. Upstaging...Because the chorus at seven was a bunch of dopey kids. 'There's a star...' 'Wha...?' 'There's a star...' 'Wha...?' 'you're a shepherd.' 'Am I? Oh yeah...'

  Flu, Trebonius, Blood
  There was a flu epidemic when I was seven so I was not only in Beauty and the Beast, I was a shepherd as well. So I was in two plays. I was a featured shepherd. After that the parts were very lean. I couldn't get into any of the big musicals - Pirates of Penzance, or any of that stuff.

  On stage

  They did Julius Caesar and I played Trebonius. Of all the conspirators against Caesar, Trebonius is the most boring. One, because his name sounds like trombone and two, because there's a line where they go:

  OMNES
  See, Trebonius knows his mark, for look how he leads Mark Antony away so that Mark Antony will not be there when it all gets really tough with Caesar and we stick all the plastic daggers in with the syringe of blood attached. So that means Trebonius won't have a plastic dagger and a syringe of blood because he'll be standing in the fucking wings when it happens.

  I wasn't on stage. I'm just in the wings with Mark Antony going, 'Ah, they're doing it with the old plastic daggers.' There's ten conspirators and nine of them are on stage stabbing Julius Caesar and there's one in the wings.

  I'm not fucking there.

  They used to take photographs in dress rehearsals and there's all these conspirators with their plastic daggers, except for one kid who's got the syringe full of blood facing the camera. One kid called Caldwell, who was...shot.

  Laughs, Accents, Explosions
  I did get into one thing, though. I always liked comedy, and when I was twelve I got my first laughs. We did this revue in a class taken by a teacher called Sam Grey. He was kind of different. Apparently he got married and he had this motorbike trip around South America planned so he went and did that instead of a honeymoon. Watergate was happening at the time and he used to read the tapes out to us. He told us how to say 'breast' in French.

  And Sam Grey did this revue, and we were doing all these sketches we'd written and I got distinct laughs on a solo bit. It was a mime thing. This guy was bowling to me and I was supposed to be a cricketer and I was batting the ball away with supreme confidence and arrogance, looking for the ball in the distance then realising I'd smashed the wicket. I remember thinking, hey, I've got laughs here!

  And then I discovered Peter Sellers. My dad had his records and I remember trying to do the accents. Trying to do an Indian accent before I thought, this actually gets me into a difficult area, because if you do different ethnic accents from around the world it can look like you're taking the piss. I do a routine about the Welsh guys carving Stonehenge and I try to make sure I'm not taking the piss. There's these rather effete druids and the Welsh guys are going, "You fucken basstards!"

  So I was at St Bede's and...yeah. I was very fit then. I did a lot of running about. The sea is at the bottom of the school and the Downs are at the side. We used to get up at seven o'clock in the morning and walk through the sea to the reef. It would cut our feet to shreds.

  You'd hear large booms in the middle of the night, where an old World War Two mine had hit the cliffs. The school chef was a coastguard and he used to have to go out and make sure there were no others. When I was there, a searchlight would pass across the bedroom window every night from Sovereign Lighthouse. I used to go to sleep with wshhh - this flash of light going past the window. Which you got used to.

  St Bedes

  So, St Bede's. It was a good place. The head teacher there was a decent guy but he had a strong thing about not putting me in plays. I went back and harangued him recently: 'You didn't let me be in any plays.' 'Oh, I'm sorry.' 'But you didn't let me be in any plays!' 'I didn't know...' 'Why not?!' I have a big love of the South Downs now. They're kind of bonkers. On the north side they don't have any cliffs, they just slope off like a big-steep-forward-roll-possible-all-the-way-down type of hill.

  Eastbourne College, Slide Rules, Girls
  At thirteen, I went to Eastbourne College, but I had to take the first Saturday off because my dad remarried, which I thought was fun. I missed French. 'Sorry I missed French last week, my parents got married.'

  In my first year I was taught about the slide rule. They said 'The slide rule is important. Without it you can do nothing. The slide rule is the modern weapon of efficiency. With the slide rule you can get from here to the stars. Buy it, use it - your slide rule!' Within one year it was, 'Burn the slide rule. The calculator can add up with none of this fucking sliding the shit around and working out where that bit in the middle goes. Smash it over your head.'

  I had a nice plastic slide rule and everything slid up and down and you would put this bit there and move that bit up and - ah! Approximately 1400. Sometimes couldn't do it, and it would just approximate things. I saw a film where they were all going round in spacecraft and they were doing it all with slide rules. 'How far is Pluto?' 'Approximately 1400, sir.'

  At my first Eastbourne school a fifth of the pupils were girls. Maybe a quarter. At this school, there were no girls for three years, and then there were girls. So it was just...odd. At sixteen there were girls again but only one girl to every ten boys, so packs of spotty boys would follow these girls around and carry their...everything. Literally put them on a litter and carry them around. So I didn't talk to girls for a whole year. I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to pull. I can't say I'm in the first team. 'Only by the end of the year I had started using my wit. I could say, 'Yes! I am from outer-space!' Or some such shit.

  I believe in co-education all the way, although boys benefit more. Boys tend to say to girls, 'You're not working, are you?' and put them off.

  Cadets, Orienteering, Ambush
  CadetAt Eastbourne College they had compulsory cadet things. This was all marching about, running about on hilltops hiding from people and going 'Bang'. It seemed like a great game of Cowboys and Indians, if not terribly real. I was brought up on these books about the war. I know war is hell, but I sort of wanted to be involved in that struggle. It was something to do with not taking in the reality of it all, but the derring-do. Derring-do? That sounds really crap - but the running jumping climbing standing still part of it, that was the reason I wanted to be in the army. The reality is that apart from the Second World War, most wars are politically messy. The Second World War was straightforward, 'These guys are bastards and they're trying to invade everywhere. Let's stop 'em and let's defend our country.' So I link up on that patriotism.

  I went on a special course, where I was kind of disillusioned, because I didn't do very well. I was in this group and we weren't winning things, until we did orienteering, which I was great at from the Scouts. There's a whole logic of map-reading: you take a bearing and then you've got to follow that bearing even if you think you're going wrong. Because even though the compass is pointing in one direction, you tend to think, this isn't the right fucking way, but then you're just lost. So with orienteering we did all right.

  We did an ambush exercise. We were all in the back of this army truck going along. There were three trucks, and they stopped. One guy who had done this kind of thing before, said 'It's an ambush! Run for it!' So everyone leapt out of the trucks and started haring out into the undergrowth. And then some sort of colonel type came by and said, 'Look, you're not supposed to run away! We're back in Blighty.' 'No, you're not. You're all caught. And you have to go to the concentration camp.' We got taken to a 'concentration' camp. Concentration camp's a big word for it. It was like a walled, barbed-wire, enclosed area, and we were all supposed to crouch down on our haunches, so it gets really achy on your legs, with your hands behind your head. And then we worked out, 'We're supposed to escape from here’, so after a while somehow some of us got out. And then these soldiers would chase you, shooting blanks at you, and you had to try and hit them with bits of wood. It was all very basic.

  There was this paratrooper guy there and I tried to talk to him. I said, 'So what's it like being in the army?' and he said, 'Fuck off.' So I thought, well...I appreciate you bringing me on and encouraging me. There was this other kid who had been on this cadet course. He got promoted and I didn't. I just thought, this is kind of arbitrary, isn't it? I knew that I'd done just as well as him. Because I thought the idea was if you showed willing and went on this course, you'd get more stripes and all this kind of stuff.

  More Ambushes, Guns, Buses
  In fact, I'd bought a set of colonel's pips. So I used to walk around with colonel's pips on and a handgun I'd bought in France - it was like a starting pistol. We went on exercise on the Downs and they said, 'There's going to be an ambush today, you're going to be ambushed' - which is great, so we went out with .303 Enfield rifles, waiting to be ambushed. And before we went, I was doing all this action with the rifle, loading it and unloading it and stuff, until I broke it.

  I had broken my gun, so I had a large rifle that didn't work, and this pistol, and my colonel's pips. So I got there and we were all just wandering around, waiting for an ambush - and then, 'Ambush!' And so everyone gets down on the ground and we're shooting away, they're ambushing us and we're ambushing them. We've all got things that go bang, basically. We're going 'Bang bang'. And they're going 'Bang bang bang', and we're going 'Bang bang bang bang'.

  After a while, we start thinking, we're not getting hit doing this, so we start standing up and going 'Bang bang bang'. Obviously this would make us die in real life - but we realised we weren't actually killing anyone, so we started shooting at anyone. I just went around with my pistol, shooting at my own people. Bang bang bang - a crazy afternoon.

  They said, 'All right, you've done very well in that, except you're all dead and you all cheated. Now you've got to get back into Eastbourne without getting caught by, I don't know, Nazi storm troopers or something. So do it by the cunningest method you know.' Everyone was going around the Downs, so me and this guy called Paul Wedge went down to a bus stop and got on a bus, when the schools were emptying out at about four o'clock. So we took a bus into town with a load of school kids as our way of getting back. Which I thought was the initiative thing; the SAS thing. We were sitting there with rifles and uniforms, surrounded by kids all staring at us. We made our way back and got in early.

  Billy Bragg, SAS… Comedy?
  It was a weird time. I was driving parallel ideas. There was no way you could be a comedy performer in the army. The ENSA thing didn't really happen. I was talking to Billy Bragg about it. Billy Bragg's the only person who's been on Top of the Pops who can drive a tank.

  The SAS was advanced running, jumping and standing still. Blue berets and very secretive. They were all self-sufficient so if one member of a platoon got killed, then the others knew what to do. It wasn't like, 'Oh, he was the explosives guy. We're going to have to do explosives without him.' 'I don't know about explosives. They go bang, don't they?'

  But it wasn't making any sense to me because I just wanted to do comedy. There was just an idea that performing comedy was crazy, but as I got closer and closer to sixteen, I just thought, this is possible. I wasn't running around anymore, so I wasn't fit, and I didn't get promoted so I thought, bugger that.

  And after the course, I obviously thought, if merit isn't rewarded then, fuck it, I'll go and be a transvestite.

  [Editor’s note: Transmission ends. But Eddie did go on to have great success in both comedy and transvestism. This wasn’t immediate, of course. First came the street performing, then the move into comedy clubs, appearing at London’s famous Comedy Store in 1987, and running his own club, Raging Bull, in Soho, where Eddie started to attract notice for his improvisatory skills. Then in 1993, he took a massive risk, booking the Ambassador’s Theatre in London’s West End for a run of his first one man show. It worked.]

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard

  Eddie Izzard
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Eddie Izzard
  EddieIzzard.jpg
  Izzard performing in December 2008
  Birth name Edward John Izzard
  Born 7 February 1962 (age 55)
  Colony of Aden
  Years active 1982–present
  Genres
  Surreal humour Improvisational comedy Observational comedy Physical comedy
  Website Official website
  Edward John Izzard[5] (/ˈɪzɑːrd/; born 7 February 1962) is an English stand-up comedian, actor, writer and political activist. His comedic style takes the form of rambling, whimsical monologue, and self-referential pantomime. He had a starring role in the television series The Riches as Wayne Malloy and has appeared in films such as Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, Mystery Men, Shadow of the Vampire, The Cat's Meow, Across the Universe and Valkyrie. He has also worked as a voice actor in The Wild, Igor, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Cars 2 and The Lego Batman Movie.

  Izzard has cited his main comedy role model as Monty Python, and John Cleese once referred to him as the "Lost Python".[1] In 2009, he completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief despite having no prior history of long-distance running.[6] He has won numerous awards including a Primetime Emmy Award for Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program for his comedy special Dress to Kill, in 2000. Izzard's website won the Yahoo People's Choice Award[7] and earned the Webby Award.[8]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 Comedy
  2.2 Theatrical, TV and film appearances
  3 Comic style
  4 Political views and activism
  5 Personal life
  6 Critical reception
  7 Books
  8 Discography
  9 Filmography
  9.1 Film
  9.2 Television
  9.3 Theatre
  9.4 Video games
  10 See also
  11 References
  12 Further reading
  13 External links
  Early life[edit]
  Izzard was born on 7 February 1962, in the Colony of Aden,[9] the younger son of English parents. The Izzard family name is of French Huguenot descent.[10] His mother, Dorothy Ella, was a midwife and nurse; his father, Harold John Izzard, was an accountant who was working in Aden with British Petroleum.[11][12]

  A year after Izzard's birth, the family moved to Bangor, County Down, and lived there until he was five.[1][5][9][11] The family then moved to Skewen, West Glamorgan, where his mother died of cancer when Izzard was six and his brother, Mark, was eight.[5][12][13] Izzard and his brother built a model railway to occupy their time while their mother was ill; it was donated to the Bexhill Museum in 2016.[14]

  Following his mother's death, Izzard attended boarding schools[5][12] such as St John's School in Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan,[2] as well as St Bede's Prep School[15] and Eastbourne College in East Sussex.[16] He said that he knew he was a transgender person[17] at the age of four, after watching another boy being forced to wear a dress by his sisters, and knew he wanted to be an actor at the age of seven.[18]

  Career[edit]
  Comedy[edit]
  Izzard began to toy with comedy at the University of Sheffield, with student friend Rob Ballard.[3][19] After leaving his accountancy degree course, he and Ballard took their act to the streets,[3][19] often in Covent Garden.[2][20][21] After his split with Ballard, Izzard spent a great deal of the early 1980s working as a street performer in Europe and the United States. Izzard says that he developed his comedic voice by talking to his audience while doing solo escape acts after splitting with Ballard.[22] He then moved his act into the stand-up comedy venues of Britain. His first gig was at the Banana Cabaret in Balham, London.[5][23]

  In 1987, he made his first stage appearance at the Comedy Store in London.[1] He refined his material throughout the 1980s, and in the early 1990s he finally began earning some measure of recognition through his improvisation, in part at his own club "Raging Bull" in Soho.[21]

  Izzard speaks French well and has performed stand-up shows in the language; from 2014 he began to perform in German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic,[24] all languages that he did not previously speak.[25]

  Theatrical, TV and film appearances[edit]

  Izzard at the 2013 British Academy Awards
  In 1994, Izzard made his West End drama debut as the lead in the world premiere of David Mamet's The Cryptogram with Lindsay Duncan, in the production at London's Comedy Theatre. The success of that role led to his second starring role in David Beaird's black comedy 900 Oneonta. In 1995, he portrayed the title character in Christopher Marlowe's Edward II.[26]

  In 1998 Izzard appeared briefly on stage with the Monty Python team in The American Film Institute's Tribute to Monty Python (also referred to as Monty Python Live at Aspen). He walked on stage with the five surviving Pythons and he was summarily escorted off by Eric Idle and Michael Palin as he attempted to participate in a discussion about how the group got together.[27] He has appeared in a number of episodes of BBC 1's Have I Got News For You.

  Izzard portrayed comedian Lenny Bruce in the 1999 production of Julian Barry's 1971 play Lenny. In 2001, he replaced Clive Owen in Peter Nichols' 1967 play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg at the Comedy Theatre. Izzard and Victoria Hamilton then repeated their lead roles when the show was brought to Broadway in 2003, with the Roundabout Theatre Company production. The revival received four Tony Award nominations including Best Revival of a Play, Best Leading Actor and Actress for its stars Izzard and Hamilton in their Broadway debuts, and Best Direction for Laurence Boswell. In June 2010, Izzard replaced James Spader in the role of Jack Lawson in David Mamet's play Race on Broadway.[28]

  Izzard has appeared in numerous films, starting with 1996's The Secret Agent. He has appeared as several real-life individuals, including Charlie Chaplin in The Cat's Meow, actor Gustav von Wangenheim in Shadow of the Vampire and General Erich Fellgiebel in Valkyrie. Other roles have included Mr. Kite in Across the Universe, Lussurioso in Revengers Tragedy and criminal expert Roman Nagel in Ocean's Twelve and Ocean's Thirteen. Voice work has included the titular It in Five Children and It, Nigel in The Wild and the mouse warrior Reepicheep in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. He said in 2009 that he would not be reprising his role as Reepicheep and the role was ultimately played by Simon Pegg in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. He has stated he felt he learnt to act whilst working on the film Circus[29].

  Izzard appeared in the 2009 BBC science fiction miniseries The Day of the Triffids based on the 1951 novel, alongside Jason Priestley, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, Dougray Scott and Brian Cox.[30]

  Izzard presented the medals to the athletes who had won the 800m T54 race at the London 2012 Paralympic Games, including gold medalist David Weir.[31]

  He played Dr. Hatteras, a sceptical psychology professor, in the Showtime series United States of Tara[32] and appeared in six episodes of the 2013–15 American psychological thriller–horror television series Hannibal as Dr. Abel Gideon.

  In June 2017 Izzard read extracts from his autobiography Believe Me for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.[33]

  Comic style[edit]

  Elliott Gould and Eddie Izzard
  Izzard uses a stream-of-consciousness delivery that jumps between topics. As he put it in a 2004 interview with The Guardian, "It's the oral tradition. Human beings have been doing it for thousands of years".[34] His bent towards the surreal even went so far as to produce a sitcom called Cows in 1997 for Channel 4, a live action comedy with actors dressed in cowsuits.[35]

  Political views and activism[edit]
  Izzard has engaged in campaigning work. He is especially well known as a pro-European Union campaigner, supporting the further integration of the UK into the EU. In May 2005, he appeared on the BBC's political debate show Question Time, describing himself as a "British-European", comparing this with other cultural identities such as "African-American". As part of his integration campaigning, he was one of the first people to spend a Euro in London. This pan-European approach has influenced his work; he regularly performs in French[20][32] and occasionally in German.[21] On 16 June 2017, on the "Overtime" segment of HBO political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, Izzard claimed to be working in four languages: Spanish, German, French and English.

  In July 2003, Izzard received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, for "pro-Europe campaigning", "his contribution to promoting modern languages and tolerance of other cultures and lifestyles", and for having "transcended national barriers" with his humour.[36] He has also campaigned unsuccessfully against the closure of the departments of Drama and Languages, Linguistics and Translation at the University of East Anglia, although the department of Drama was later reprieved.[37]

  In 1998, Izzard was named in a list of the biggest private financial donors to the Labour Party.[38] He appeared in a party political broadcast for the Labour Party in the run up to the 2005 general election. He donated nearly £10,000 to the party in 2008,[39] appeared again in a party political broadcast for the 2009 European election, and again in a 2010 election video entitled Brilliant Britain. Izzard appeared in literature to support changing the British electoral system from first-past-the-post to alternative vote for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons in the Alternative Vote referendum in 2011.[40] In 2011, Izzard revealed that he had political ambitions and wanted to become an MP, Mayor, or MEP by 2020.[41] On 25 February 2016, Izzard announced his intention to stand for the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.[42] It was announced on 9 August 2016 that Izzard had failed to be elected to the NEC.[43]

  On 20 July 2006, he received an honorary doctorate in Letters from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sheffield,[44] where he spent one year on an Accounting and Financial Management course in the early 1980s. During his time at the university he established the now-defunct Alternative Productions Society in the Union of Students with the aim of promoting fringe-based arts. On 4 March 2010, he was elected as the Honorary President of the University of Sheffield Students' Union.[45]

  On 7 July 2007, Izzard was one of the presenters from the London leg of Live Earth. During an interview for the 2008 Stripped tour, he spoke about becoming more active in European politics as well as running for political office in Europe within the next decade. Izzard added a stop in New Orleans during his 2008 Stripped tour. All proceeds from the performance of 23 June 2008 were donated to Neighbourhood Housing Services of New Orleans.[46]

  In March 2014, Izzard began leading a campaign encouraging Scots not to vote for independence in the September referendum, saying that England would feel a "deep sense of loss" if Scotland were to leave the UK.[47]

  Izzard is an outspoken supporter of the Labour Party. In September 2011, he declared his ambition to stand for the party in the future as an MP, MEP, or Mayor of London,[48] announcing an intention to stand for the London mayoral election in 2020.[49][50] When asked on comedy panel show The Last Leg why he thought he might be elected, he replied "Boris Johnson".[51] He is also a republican, believing that Britain should have a democratically elected head of state.[52] He has stated that he is a social democrat, not a socialist.[53]

  Izzard at a Labour Party rally in 2015
  Izzard confirmed his support for Labour in the 2015 general election, attending a party rally with fellow comedian Ben Elton and actress Sally Lindsay in April 2015.[54]

  On 27 July 2009, with only 5 weeks' training and no significant prior running experience, Izzard began seven weeks of back-to-back marathon runs (with Sundays off) across the UK to raise money for Sport Relief. He ran from London to Cardiff to Belfast to Edinburgh and back to London, carrying the flag of the country — England, Scotland, or Wales — in which he was running. In Northern Ireland he carried a self-designed green flag bearing a white dove. The blog Eddie Iz Running documented his 43 marathons in 51 days, covering at least 27 miles per day (totaling more than 1,100 miles), ending on 15 September 2009.[55] He received a special award at BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2009 for his achievements.[56] In March 2010, Izzard took part in the Sport Relief Mile event.[57]

  On 16 February 2016 the BBC announced that Izzard would attempt to run 27 marathons in 27 days, through South Africa for Sport Relief.[58] The significance of the number 27 came from the number of years spent in prison by Nelson Mandela. In total Izzard would aim to run more than 700 miles, in temperatures of up to 40 °C. Izzard completed his first marathon on 23 February. He attempted such a project in South Africa in 2012, but withdrew with health concerns.[59] He completed the marathon challenge on 20 March, at the statue of Mandela in front of the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Because he had spent one day in hospital, he had to run two consecutive marathons on this last day. He raised more than £1.35M for Sport Relief.[60] A BBC documentary, detailing his feat, was broadcast on 28 March.[61]

  In May 2017, Izzard declared his intention to become a Labour politician after endorsing Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 UK general election. He said: "I like Jeremy Corbyn. He believes in what he says."[62] In October, he announced a renewed bid for election to Labour's National Executive Committee.[63]

  Personal life[edit]
  During his Stripped tour, Izzard said he realised he was an atheist. He said, "I was warming the material up in New York, where one night, literally on stage, I realised I didn't believe in God at all. I just didn't think there was anyone upstairs."[64] He has since described himself as a spiritual atheist, saying, "I don't believe in the guy upstairs, I believe in us."[65]

  Izzard keeps his romantic life private, saying one of the reasons is due to the wishes of his companions not wanting to become content for his show.[64] He dated Sarah Townsend, the director of the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,[20] whom he first met while she was running a Fringe venue at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989.[66]

  Izzard supports Crystal Palace FC and became an associate director at the club on 16 July 2012.[67]

  Izzard started to freely talk about his transvestism in venues like Edinburgh Festival as early as 1992.[68][69] His stance is that cross-dressing is neither part of his performance nor a sexual fetish.[70] He remarks in his show Unrepeatable, "Women wear what they want and so do I." According to Izzard, "Most transvestites fancy women."[71] Izzard identifies as "a straight transvestite or a male lesbian".[72] He has also described himself as "a lesbian trapped in a man's body",[73] transgender,[68][74] and "a complete boy plus half girl".[72] He has expressed a belief that being transgender is caused by genetics and that someday this will be scientifically proven, having gone so far as to have his own genome sequenced.[75]

  Critical reception[edit]
  On 18 March 2007, Izzard was listed as number 3 of the 100 Greatest British National Comedians (behind Peter Kay at number 2 and Billy Connolly at number 1) as part of British television station Channel 4's ongoing 100 Greatest..., series. In the 2010 updated version of the list he was ranked 5th.[76]

  In 2012, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sunderland.[77]

  On 20 February 2013, Izzard received the 6th Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism[78][79] — an award presented at Harvard University each year by the Humanist Community at Harvard,[80] the American Humanist Association, and the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics.

  In 2015, Izzard was chosen, by readers of The Guardian, as their 2014 public language champion. The award was announced in central London, at the Guardian and British Academy 2014 Schools Language Awards, as part of the annual Language Festival.[81]

  Books[edit]
  Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens (2017), Michael Joseph, ISBN 978-0718181727.[82]

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/sep/10/eddie-izzard-trying-to-get-mother-back-victoria-and-abdul

  Eddie Izzard: ‘Everything I do in life is trying to get my mother back’
  Eddie Izzard relishes a challenge. The transgender hero has done standup in French and German, run dozens of marathons, and is now in a period drama with Judi Dench. But, he reveals, his can-do attitude has a melancholy source…
  Eddie Izzard: ‘I have a very strong sense that we are only on this planet for a short length of time'
  Eddie Izzard: ‘I have a very strong sense that we are only on this planet for a short length of time.’ Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer
  Tim Adams

  Sun 10 Sep ‘17 03.30 EDT Last modified on Sat 2 Dec ‘17 12.03 EST
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  There was a literal turning point in Eddie Izzard’s lifelong pursuit of personal freedom. It came one afternoon in 1985 when he had gone out for the first time in a dress and heels and full makeup down Islington high street. He was 23 and he had been planning – and avoiding – that moment for just about as long as he could remember. The turning point came after he was chased down the road by some teenage girls who had caught him changing back into his jeans in the public toilets and wanted to let him know he was weird. That pursuit ended when eventually, faced with the screamed question “Hey, why were you dressed as a woman?”, he decided simply to stop running and turn and explain himself.

  Eddie Izzard reveals years of transgender abuse to court
  Read more
  He spun around to give an answer, but before he got many words out the girls had run in the opposite direction. The experience taught him some things: that there was power in confronting fear rather than avoiding it; and that from then on he would never let other people define him. After that afternoon, he says, he not only felt he could face down the things that scared him, he went chasing after them: street performing, standup comedy, marathon running, political activism, improvising his stage show in different languages – all these things felt relatively easy after that original coming out as what he calls “transvestite or transgender”. “You think, if I can do something that hard, but positive – maybe I can do anything.”

  The “anything” he has been doing most recently is to take on the challenge of acting opposite Judi Dench and Michael Gambon. In Stephen Frears’s interpretation of the true story of Queen Victoria’s late-life friendship with an Indian servant, Victoria & Abdul, Izzard plays a full-bearded, tweed-suited Bertie (later Edward VII), reining in his comic instincts to inhabit the outrage and scheming of a son seeing his mother apparently making a fool of herself. Izzard has done plenty of films before – he was in Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen alongside George Clooney and Brad Pitt and the rest – but nothing that has required quite this level of costume drama restraint. He loved it.

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  Watch a trailer for Victoria & Abdul.
  He and Dench are old friends. She has been a regular at his stage shows and has been in the habit, for reasons forgotten, of sending a banana to his dressing room each opening night, with “Good luck!” written on it. Seeing her channel Victoria at close quarters was a daily masterclass. The film was shot partly at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight (the first time any film crew had been allowed inside by English Heritage) and the cast would let their hair down in the evenings. One time, Izzard recalls: “I was dancing with Judi to Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’. She felt like a young woman, a young teenage girl almost. Judi has this amazing spark of vitality that traces all the way back to her youth.”

  Watching the film, you’re so ready to see Izzard slip into one of his wayward meanders of consciousness that for a while it seems odd that he stays on script. Does it feel that way to him too?

  “Not now,” he says. “My early work as an actor wasn’t very good because I just switched all my comedy muscles off, and I didn’t know what to replace them with. I think I have learned more how to just ‘be’ on film now. It is just like knowing how to both ride a bicycle and drive a car. If you are in a car you don’t want to lean sideways to turn a corner. You know the difference.”

  I started doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because I thought it might bring her back

  Ever since he bunked off school and conned his way into Pinewood Studios as a 15-year-old and wandered the film sets for a day, he has imagined himself an actor. The first thing he did when his comedy finally took off after years of trying and often failing to make people laugh was to get himself a drama agent and see if he could pursue a twin career. He has never been satisfied with just doing one thing, and it appears that determination to diversify has only grown. He’s 55, and because of his running – which peaked at 43 marathons in 57 days in the UK and 27 in 27 days in South Africa for Sport Relief – he looks lean and almost alarmingly bright-eyed. We are talking in a hotel room in London, and he is dressed sharply in “boy with eyeliner” mode. He works on the belief, he says, that human beings were never made to sit still or settle, but to place themselves in challenging situations, and then work out how to cope.

  “World war two is a good example,” he suggests. “People got dropped behind enemy lines with no idea of what they were going into. They had to learn to do a great deal under extreme pressure and on the move. And they proved they could. In a very different way, I think coming out as transgender allowed me to put myself in other terrifying situations and work them out once I was in them. I knew I would get through the bad, terrifying bit – and there was a lot of that when I was a street performer – and eventually get to a more interesting place.”

  Running one of many marathons for Sport Relief in July 2009.
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  Running one of many marathons for Sport Relief in July 2009. Photograph: Alfie Hitchcock/Rex
  He has, of late, paused to reflect on the motivations behind that impulse, first in a documentary film, Believe: the Eddie Izzard Story, made by his ex-lover and long-term collaborator Sarah Townsend, and then in an autobiography, Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens. The first two elements of that latter subtitle mostly led Izzard back to his mother, who died of cancer when he was six years old. Making the film, Townsend came to suggest that all Izzard’s inspired digressive habits circled around this truth, and in his book, in opening chapters too poignant to read easily, he expands on that thought.

  “Toward the end of the film, I started talking about my mother… ” he recalls. “And I said something revelatory: ‘I know why I’m doing all this,’ I said. ‘Everything I do in life is trying to get her back. I think if I do enough things… that maybe she’ll come back.’” When he said those words, he says, it felt like his unconscious speaking. The thought stayed with him that “I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because on some level, on some childlike magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back.”

  I wonder, having got those things out into the public, nearly half a century on, if it has changed how he thinks about himself?

  I was feeling a bit sluggish recently, so I did seven marathons in seven days

  “I certainly feel I am in a better place,” he says – but also it has given him a sense of his own strangeness. “There is that thing where people say wow about the marathons or whatever. And I kind of say wow too, because there are some things I did that, looking back, I don’t know how I did them. Running a double marathon on the last day in South Africa. It was 11 hours of not fun. And about five minutes of euphoria. I’m not sure how I did that.”

  One of the things about marathons – even if you are running, as he was some of the time in the UK, followed by an ice-cream van blaring the Chariots of Fire theme – is that there is an awful lot of time for thinking. Does his mind ever pause for breath?

  “I have a lucky thing,” he says, “which is that I am interested in any question – how did we get here? all the religions. I can think about anything. For example when I did the 43 [marathons] I ran past a sign saying ‘the Battle of Naseby: 1 mile’ and I’m immediately off thinking about Cromwell and Fairfax, Prince Rupert maybe, and how this road I was running on would have been a track back then and maybe the cavalry came down it, how did they get cannon round that bend, all that, at every moment… ”

  Campaigning for Labour during the general election in 2015.
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  Campaigning for Labour during the general election in 2015. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
  Talking to Izzard, and watching him perform, you sense he has a kind of need of not ever wanting to miss any scrap of experience. It’s partly, he suggests, why he has broadened his repertoire of doing standup in different languages in recent years.

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  “German has been the hardest so far,” he says. He is doing Arabic next, planning a show in the Yemen (he was born in Aden, where his father worked for a time for BP) to draw attention to the brutal civil war there, and after that, Mandarin Chinese. As he explains this, blithely, I’m reminded both of the passages in his book where he writes about the strategies he developed to overcome severe dyslexia as a child, and his uneasy relationship with his late stepmother, Kate. The antithesis of performing as a younger man for the memory of his mother was a refusal to be limited by Kate’s efforts to control him. She wanted him to be an accountant because he was good with numbers, if not with reading. He recalls her once telling him: “You’ve got to understand that you are a cog in the machine. As soon as you understand that, you can fit in and get on with life.” You can only imagine how that went down. Does he ever think he will become more accepting of limits?

  “I have a very strong sense that we are only on this planet for a short length of time,” he says. “And that is only growing. Religious people might think it goes on after death. My feeling is that if that is the case it would be nice if just one person came back and let us know it was all fine, all confirmed. Of all the billions of people who have died, if just one of them could come through the clouds and say, you know, ‘It’s me Jeanine, it’s brilliant, there’s a really good spa’, that would be great.” He pauses. “Although what if heaven was only like three-star, OK-ish. You know, ‘Some of the taps don’t work… ’”

  He puts his success down not to any particular talent, but to his being “brilliantly boring. Some people are maybe brilliantly interesting. But I have the opposite gift.” That, and stamina, and that unlimited curiosity about the world.

  For a BBC series about genealogy he went to Africa to trace the percentage of his genetic make-up that was Neanderthal. It reinforced his sense that there was nothing new under the sun, that people had always been the same. “We never think of cavemen being envious of the neighbours with the better cave, but no doubt they were,” he says.

  In villages in Namibia, women were fascinated by his nail varnish; some of the men, too. “You know if you have a football and some nail polish and a smile you can walk into any village in the world and find friends,” he says. “There are 7 billion of us on the planet now and we should be linking up more. Ninety-nine per cent of us would be live-and-let-live and ‘Hi and how are you?’. But the 1% aren’t happy with that, they want to actively stir it up and tell us that is not the way to go on.”

  Meeting the Bakola Pygmies in Cameroon for a BBC series to trace his genetic make-up.
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  Meeting the Bakola Pygmies in Cameroon for a BBC series to trace his genetic make-up. Photograph: BBC
  Talk of politics is a reminder of Izzard’s interventions in last year’s referendum campaign, in which he tried to use his experiences of doing comedy in French and German and Spanish as an example of how Europe might be a place where you could share culture, rather than be defensive about it. In those fevered weeks, his arguments were sometimes made to look naive; the Mail and the rest roasted him after an awkward encounter with Nigel Farage on Question Time.

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  He admits that he is sometimes still learning in politics, but is unrepentant about his efforts to try to advance a cause that he has been engaged in as a performer for a long while.

  “Running and hiding from Europe cannot be the way forward for us,” he says. “The idea that Britain can go back to 1970 and it will still be all the same just can’t be an option.”

  Does he think there is still hope for Remainers?

  “It seems to me people are always capable of being either brave and curious or fearful and suspicious. If you track humanity all the way through, the periods of success for civilisation are those periods where we have been brave and curious.”

  There is plenty of fear and suspicion in the world though. How does he think it will go?

  “I don’t know. If you look at the 1930s there are obviously clear examples of how individuals can spin these kinds of fears and twist them, and then you get what historians usually call mass-murdering fuckheads in power.”

  He has long talked of looking to run as a Labour MP in the next election. Is that still the case?

  “Yes, the plan was always to run in 2020, though Theresa May has changed that with her failed power grab. So now it’s the first general election after 2020.”

  He will also put himself forward for Labour’s national executive committee at the party conference this year. He didn’t make it last time, though he got 70,000 votes. And if and when he becomes an MP, he will give up acting and performing?

  “I would. It’s like Glenda Jackson; she gave up acting for 25 years to concentrate on it, then she turns up back as King Lear.”

  With Ali Fazal, Judi Dench and director Stephen Frears for a screening of Victoria & Abdul at the Venice film festival.
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  With Ali Fazal, Judi Dench and director Stephen Frears for a screening of Victoria & Abdul at the Venice film festival. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
  I wonder if another ambition, to eventually have children, still applies?

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  “I always said kids in my 50s. But I also always felt that I had to do things first. Get this stuff done. But yes, I haven’t given up on that.”

  For someone who was dealt an early lesson about the fragility of life, his long-term planning sounds odd. Does he feel that contradiction?

  “I think we should all choose a year we would like to live to, and do everything we can to make that work. I mean it could all go wrong at any point, obviously. But we also know that if we don’t get ill or get hit by a bus we can help ourselves by drinking enough water and keeping as fit as you were when you were a kid. As we get older and we get a bit creaky we take that as a sign to stop doing stuff. My sense is we should push through creaky. I was feeling a bit sluggish recently, about a month ago, I thought right, I’ll do seven marathons in seven days. And off I go. The first four were a bit rubbish, but you push on through that.”

  He must have good joints?

  “I mangled my knee up a while ago, trying to jump over a fence,” he says. “But it healed up, and now it complains only when I don’t use it enough.”

  Is there some genetic explanation for his energy?

  “Dad loved football, played until his late 30s. I don’t know about Mum. She liked singing and comedy and Flanders and Swann but I’m not sure about sport.”

  I hear his voice break just slightly. Izzard still can’t really talk about his mother easily, at least not in an interview. In his book he describes how in the immediate aftermath of her death he and his dad and his brother cried together for half an hour and then stopped in case they went on for ever. In place of therapy dad bought his sons a model railway set and they built it in the spare room and immersed themselves in it. The set recently resurfaced when Izzard had it restored and donated it to a museum in their home town of Bexhill-on-Sea, another part of his excavation of that time.

  “Dad encouraged us with it after Mum died,” he says, by way of explanation. “He made a table for us and we spent hours and hours building it. Then in 1975 my stepmother, Kate, came along and it was put away into boxes and never came out again. It went from Dad’s attic to my brother’s attic, and he didn’t know what to do with it. I thought, why not give it to the museum in Bexhill? I guessed there might be plenty of model railway enthusiasts in Bexhill, and they rebuilt this thing, it’s kind of a collector’s item. They are now going to build another one, a Christmas version. We had a grand opening and Dad came down to see it.”

  He likes the fact that he is in a position to make these kinds of things happen. Is he happier now than ever?

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  “I always wanted the kind of profile that you can leverage to do the things you want,” he says. “There is no path into it. You have to work out how you get there – over the wall, or tunnel your way in. I always thought doing the same thing was actually going backwards. And if you start saying ‘Hi, I like chicken’ on some advert, you know you have probably reached that point.”

  You hesitate a little to ask him what he is working on next, but I do anyway.

  “I’ve written my first film,” he says. “It is called Six Minutes to Midnight, set in the summer of 1939. I’m developing a show in French in Paris. This December I am going to be on a boat, just below Notre Dame, doing two shows nightly. What else? I’m not a good reader but I always wanted to read all of Dickens, so I have found someone who will let me read them as audiobooks – I have done a third of Great Expectations and it took four days. So: 12 days. And then there is the premiere of Victoria & Abdul for which Dad is coming up from Bexhill to spend his 89th birthday with Judi Dench…”

  Out of all the things he has done, I ask, of what is he proudest?

  “Mostly I hope I have done things that help other people to do them,” he says. “That was the thing with coming out as transgender, and it was the same thing doing the marathons, or learning the languages. I hope people might think, well if that idiot can do it, why can’t I? I mean, I’m just some guy, right. Nothing special?”

  I’m not quite convinced.

  Victoria & Abdul is released on Friday 15 September. Believe Me is published by Michael Joseph (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/arts/television/16jame.html

  QUOTE:
  he acting career is the most important, because that’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” he said. “When I was 7, I wanted to act. I saw a kid up onstage, and I think it was a substitute for Mum dying. The audience was showing affection or admiration for something they saw onstage, and I just thought, I need that

  TELEVISION | TELEVISION
  Eddie Izzard’s Master Plan
  By CARYN JAMESMARCH 16, 2008

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  Eddie Izzard in the basement of the Union Square Theater, where he was working this month on his new stand-up show. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times
  EDDIE IZZARD’S metaphors don’t sit still, onstage or off; they leap into the conversation with an almost physical presence, even when he’s simply describing how tough it is for a comic to be accepted as a dramatic actor. “If you arrive in comedy,” he said, “the studios won’t let you get off that horse. You have to shoot it, you have to kill it, you have to Bill Murray kill it, boom!” and he mimes shooting a horse as he explains, “Bill Murray successfully did that so he could get to the dramatic place he wanted to be; he really had to kill that ‘Ghostbusters’ place.”

  The man who chats offstage is a less frenetic version of the performer whose fans recite lines from his stand-up shows, like “Dress to Kill,” the HBO special that made him a cult figure 10 years ago. In person, he also does voices and accents, talks about Napoleon and George Washington, drops in bits of songs. (“It’s going to be about cats!” he said, jumping into a spoof Broadway musical and cheerfully singing, “He’s dead, he’s in a box,” all as a quick aside.) He pulls out a phone and shows photos of a recent vacation with his father and brother to Yemen, where he was born before the family returned to Britain when he was 1.

  But just as the inspired silliness of Bill Murray shooting the “Ghostbusters” horse almost obscures a deeper point — Mr. Izzard has analyzed that career for all it’s worth — the surreal wit veils a methodical determination to be taken seriously in drama. The guy who may be the most brilliant stand-up of his generation really wants to act. His ambitions are huge, but when he talks about his step-by-step career path he makes himself sound like some plodding worker ant.

  That would be complicated enough without adding — and he’s the one who brings it up first — that he’s a transvestite, or an “off-duty transvestite” as he tends to put it now, since he’s been appearing onstage in jeans and a blue sport jacket in a workshop version of “Stripped,” the show he’ll take on a four-month national tour starting next month.

  That was hardly his look in “Dress to Kill” or other stand-up shows. Then he appeared in heavy eye shadow, glittery shirts and sometimes skirts and fishnet stockings as he roamed the stage delivering riffs about culture, history and language — routines that are literally loopy as they swoop and circle back on themselves. In his recent New York show he quacked like an evil duck left behind after Noah loaded the ark (because, really, would the ducks have drowned?) and acted out a scene in which Jesus returns to heaven and tells his Father how he messed up on Earth. (How did he die? “Donkey cart accident.”) As he interspersed these pieces with bits about Wikipedia or updating computers, out of nowhere the evil duck quacked again.

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  But he did all this looking like his character in “The Riches,” the television series in which he plays Wayne Malloy, the father of a family of “travelers” or con artists who have taken on false identities and settled into a McMansion. Wayne masquerades as a lawyer named Doug Rich, which means that these days Eddie Izzard could pass for a corporate lawyer. (He is also an executive producer of the series, whose second season begins Tuesday on the FX network.)

  “The Riches” and his nonfemme appearance are part of his bid for the leading roles that have eluded him onscreen. He was most widely seen as the computer genius Roman Nagel in “Ocean’s 12” and “Ocean’s 13” and has another small role in “Valkyrie,” the Tom Cruise World War II movie coming this summer, but more often he has landed in parts that make you wonder what he was thinking, like the mad scientist in the flop “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.”

  He has had more substantial roles in plays, including David Mamet’s “Cryptogram” in London and “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in the West End and on Broadway (where he was nominated for a Tony). During the time of that run he lived in the West Village, and we met at Tavern on Jane, a casual restaurant a block from his old street of brick town houses. “It’s really beautiful,” he said of the neighborhood, and he recalled “going to that corner shop to get as much wood as I could to heat up — the snows of 2003.” As he does onstage, he sometimes breaks off sentences and zooms ahead, as if his mind were racing too fast to bother finishing; the rest is clear, anyway.

  His humor reflects the scattershot lunacy of Monty Python, but with flashes of Robin Williams’s manic energy and a sophisticated silliness that is entirely his own. Walk into a room, say “Cake? Or death,” and some people will fall on the floor laughing at the phrase from one of the most uproarious and sharpest parts of “Dress to Kill.” He imagined what it would have been like if the Church of England, instead of the Roman Catholic Church, had run the Inquisition. It might have resembled a polite invitation to tea with the vicar, he said in the act. “Cake? Or death?”

  Describing Mr. Izzard’s humor, Mr. Williams said by e-mail: “It sounds like a contradiction, but his comedy is gentle cutting edge. Kind of like a velvet razor.”

  Photo

  Whether doing comedy or drama, Eddie Izzard is leaving his skirts and fishnets in the closet: “I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.” Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times
  Part of this edge comes from walking onstage not knowing exactly where he’ll begin, in performances that have a sense of direction rather than a script. I saw two workshop shows a few nights apart at the Union Square Theater, and the second began with a completely fresh, high-energy rush of material, a dazzling little prologue: he danced out as though he were on Broadway, raced through a snippet about “Hamlet” (“Dad is dead?”), did Christopher Walken as George Bush, and said he is clueless about Broadway shows because “I’m a straight transvestite; I know nothing about musicals.”

  He doesn’t always mention being a transvestite in his shows, he said. But he did in the two I saw, and it worked as a disarming strategy: acknowledge it for fans who are wondering what happened, then move on. “I am a transvestite; I’m just off-duty at the moment,” he told the audience, and immediately went on, “I never was a transvestite; it was a tax thing.”

  As he explained later: “Some people would heckle me and say ‘Where’s the dress?’ and I’d say ‘Don’t oppress me, you Nazi’ — tends to shut them up. Because I have fought for the right to be able to wear a dress, not that I have to wear a dress. I didn’t jump out of a not-wearing-dress box into a have-to-wear-dress box.”

  But isn’t he now in a have-to-wear-pants box for career purposes?

  “Slightly,” he acknowledged. “Socially, politically, the number of out transvestites in the public eye are few.” And in American-accented voices he imagined one studio executive trying to persuade another to hire him:

  “ ‘Yeah, he’s a transvestite — but he hasn’t been wearing a dress for a while.’ ”

  “ ‘Yeah, I suppose that’s O.K.’ ”

  Being a transvestite is “still not part of the establishment,” he said. “ ‘Twelve transvestite senators turned up today’ — it hasn’t been said yet. You’re always sort of outside the loop.”

  When he started performing in England, he wore ordinary men’s clothes but worried that the press would learn of his transvestism and run with the news in a lurid way. He told reporters that he was a transvestite; they thought it was a joke. “So I thought, I’ll wear a dress and wear makeup,” he said, “and they wrote, ‘O.K., he is a transvestite, but he looks a mess.’ ”

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  “By the time I got to America in ’96, I thought, I’m going to bring it to America so I don’t have to do a two-step here,” he said. Eventually people saw him only as the cross-dressing stand-up, though, so he veered again, and here he is as Doug Rich.

  Sort of. In the poster art for “Stripped” he is wearing an open lacy shirt, suit and jeweled collar pin, an image he described as rock ’n’ roll. He may be wearing a bit of eye makeup — more than most men but less than Keith Richards. It’s a dandyish, Beau Brummel look that hints at the balance he has to find at this stage of his career.

  Like so many performers, he can trace the first impulse of that career to childhood. His father worked for British Petroleum, and after the family moved back to Britain, his mother died of cancer when Eddie was 6.

  “The acting career is the most important, because that’s what I wanted to do in the first place,” he said. “When I was 7, I wanted to act. I saw a kid up onstage, and I think it was a substitute for Mum dying. The audience was showing affection or admiration for something they saw onstage, and I just thought, I need that.”

  Photo

  Mr. Izzard in “The Riches.” Credit Prashant Gupta/FX
  He has plenty of adulation now. John Cleese famously called him “the lost Python,” and there is wide opinion that in his generation — he’s 46 — his only competition for sheer comic genius is Chris Rock.

  But no one is saying, “Wonder who’s better, Izzard or Sean Penn?” Why is he so bent on doing drama?

  “Because the world stopped me getting anywhere. I was ready at, really, 7. I was ready at 10.” Even now, he said, his attitude is a relentless “I will not stop until I get the thing.”

  It’s not as if he was a natural at stand-up. He was more facile at sketch comedy but couldn’t get a job; he tried street performing and was bad at it. And at first, he said: “I could not do stand-up to save my life. Apparently now I’m quite good at it, but I know how I’ve got that good: it’s just by — I will do gig after gig after gig after gig.”

  He can be an extremely effective actor. His strongest screen role so far has been as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich’s underrated 2001 film, “The Cat’s Meow,” about a 1920s murder on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht. His Chaplin is a driven, complex character, self-absorbed yet madly in love with Hearst’s mistress.

  Mr. Bogdanovich said he had never heard of Eddie Izzard when his name was mentioned for the role but went to see his stand-up act, then asked him to lunch: “I remember he came in wearing a padded bra, and I thought, ‘O.K., I’m not going to say anything about this.’ ” Mr. Bogdanovich now gives Mr. Izzard huge credit for helping to shape the character by improvising and working on dialogue.

  “Hollywood and movie producers tend to think in clichés,” Mr. Bogdanovich added, considering why Mr. Izzard’s film career hasn’t taken off. “They just see him as a stand-up who occasionally acts, and they don’t realize the depth of his talent. He can do just about anything. Eddie is very, very gifted, not just as an actor but as a writer and a shaper of material.”

  “The Riches” gets him partway to the dramatic place where he wants to be. The Malloys — Wayne, his wife, Dahlia (played by Minnie Driver), and their three children — are acting every minute of their lives, pretending to be the Riches. But the show is deliberately not Wayne-playing-Doug-channeling-Eddie. The series has its dark moments even as it puts a clever, mordant spin on the idea of upward mobility and reinvention in America.

  Fun and smart though it is, though, it’s not in ground-breaking “Sopranos” territory, and Wayne Malloy is not quite a star-making role. Last season’s ratings were good, not spectacular. And as the screenwriters’ strike was ending, FX decided not to go back into production to complete the season, truncating it to the seven episodes already shot. John Landgraf, the president of FX, said it had been a practical and economic decision, because the last episodes would have competed with a flood of returning network series. If the audience grows a bit, he said, the show could return for a third season.

  To Mr. Izzard, “The Riches” is a major step toward other leading roles and a way to leverage himself into even more stand-up. An American series seen in foreign countries, he said, opens the door to doing stand-up there. He has performed in French and says he plans to learn German and Russian well enough to do gigs in those languages too. If he is a worker ant, he’s an ant quietly plotting world domination.

  And while few people would bet on “The Riches” returning, he insisted he’s not worried about Season 2, but Season 7. He would not budge from that position; he is relentless. The difficulty of bringing back “The Riches” was, of all things, the question he would not hear.

  Correction: March 30, 2008
  An article on March 16 about Eddie Izzard described the setup to his “Cake? Or Death?” routine incorrectly. He imagined what would have happened if the Church of England rather than the Roman Catholic Church had run the Inquisition — not if the Church of England rather than the Romans had tried to conquer the world.

• Vanity Fair - https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/03/eddie-izzard-defines-drag-and-explains-how-hes-like-george-washington

  QUOTE:
  Very little in life came easily for the British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard. When he was six, his mother died of cancer, and shortly thereafter he was sent away to boarding school. He suffered from dyslexia and had an incurable penchant for cross-dressing. After spending years struggling to make ends meet as a street performer, he began to get noticed in London’s comedy clubs and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

  Eddie Izzard Defines Drag and Explains How He’s Like George Washington
  by KRISTA SMITH
  MARCH 4, 2010 11:38 AM
  Izzard.jpg
  Very little in life came easily for the British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard. When he was six, his mother died of cancer, and shortly thereafter he was sent away to boarding school. He suffered from dyslexia and had an incurable penchant for cross-dressing. After spending years struggling to make ends meet as a street performer, he began to get noticed in London’s comedy clubs and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

  Izzard’s breakthrough in the U.S. came in the late 1990s with his Dress to Kill comedy tour (broadcast on HBO in 1999). More recently, he delivered a tour de force performance as Charlie Chaplin in Peter Bogdanovich’s Old-Hollywood mystery The Cat’s Meow, was part of the ensemble cast of Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen, and starred in the FX Network original series The Riches. A documentary about his life, Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story, is out now on DVD.

  I met Izzard, who was looking very smart in a jacket and tie (no eyeliner), at the Downtown Standard hotel in Los Angeles. He was in town preparing to host the Independent Spirit Awards, which will be broadcast this Friday—live and unedited—on the IFC Channel.

  I want to talk to you about the Independent Spirit Awards, but first I just have to say: watching your documentary, Believe, made me think about how much better looking you got as you aged.

  Watch Now: Six New Year's Resolutions for Gary Cohn

  So what you’re saying is that I was really ugly in a certain period of my life.

  No! But in the documentary, when we see you in those awful, baggy grey pants and Hawaiian shirt, I was like, Oof! I prefer the dress.

  I know, I know. There are two different things, though. One is getting better looking, the other is wearing clothes that are appropriate.

  You basically transformed from having kind of a frat-guy kind of look to coming out in women’s clothing. Was it because you found you had better style as a transvestite than you did as a straight man?

  It’s actually more because, stylistically I was really fucked. I just wore clothes and I had no self-image. As a kid, because you’re younger and you’re thinner, you just have the cute look. Then you think about what you want your look to be, and you think, Actually, I’m a transvestite! But you ignore that, so what do you do? When my standup career was taking off, I was wearing these crap clothes—people said “My god, he’s wearing really crap clothes!” I just had no sense of anything. I had all these crazy ideas [about my act], but the idea of getting in dresses—that I really felt forced to do. When I first came out, I was talking about being a transvestite, and the critics said, “Is this just a joke? He’s a transvestite, but he’s also a mess.” So I thought, All right, I better work on that. If you’re a bloke and you’re wearing a dress, you really better try and have a go, or else what the hell are you doing? I needed a lot of work and a lot of help in that area, and that came from other people.

  Will you be in drag for the Spirit Awards?

  Not drag—drag means costume. What I do is just wearing a dress. But no, I’ll be in boy mode—I’ll be a superhero.

  One of my favorite things explored in the documentary is your relationship with your father. It’s just so beautiful, so moving, when he talks about having to accept your children as they are, and about how your mom told him that you were wearing her clothes when you were very little.

  Yeah, she found that I was wearing her clothes. But he never told me that he knew. The first time I heard it was in the documentary. How weird that is. And all he said is that my mother found me wearing her clothes. He didn’t say what her reaction to it was.

  No, he didn’t. But he wasn’t bothered. When did you tell him?

  I told him after a football match—a soccer match. I’d spent the whole day trying to work out how to tell him.

  This was when you were performing?

  I’d come out six years before, but I hadn’t told my father. Some people told me, “Don’t tell your dad, it will break him.” I thought, It won’t break my dad. But I wasn’t sure. So for six years I’d told everyone except him, and the only time we got together was for a football match—he has a season ticket and a spare ticket, so I’d go with him or my brother would go with him. I was with him and I thought, O.K., I’ll tell him today. Then I couldn’t tell him during the match—we could lose! What? We lost and you’re a transvestite? And I couldn’t tell him as we were leaving the match, because we were walking with loads of football fans who were up for a fight at any point; if he yelled, “You’re a transvestite?!,” everyone would pummel my head. So I said, “Why don’t we go get some chips?” So we go to this cafe. It had a sectioned-off back room with about three tables. One was being used. We sat down and I kept thinking, I can’t tell him now, there are people right there. But then they got up and left, and I thought, Right, so say it now. Now! Before anyone else comes in.” So I told him, and he was very calm about it. Then he went home and wrote me a letter. It must be somewhere. But anyway, he wrote me that he was cool with it. And that he thought my mum, if she were alive, would have been cool with it too. It was an amazing letter. I was prepared to say, “O.K., we’ll never talk again, but I just wanted to tell you that.” I was prepared for every eventuality. I’d heard complete horror stories. People urinating on their children.

  When you perform, how much of it is ad-libbed? I know it’s all written and rehearsed, but

  None of it is written and none of it is rehearsed. I just come up with an idea. I go on with whatever I said last time and then I just ad-lib as much as I can in each show.

  So it’s all in your head?

  Yeah, I have a very big mental map. I’m dyslexic, and I have a very good mental map, but I have a very bad processing speed.

  And you’re able to perform in German and French, right?

  French, yes. German I will and Russian I will. But it’s the relentlessness that I really believe in. I just won’t stop. And in a way, that’s the American spirit. Like George Washington—he wasn’t a great general. See, I’m not really great at anything, but I’ve learned to be good.

  You’re great at not giving up.

  That’s what Washington was great at. If you study Washington, you’ll find that it wasn’t great tactics, but he wouldn’t give up and he wouldn’t back down. He wouldn’t let anyone take over for him. He’d say, “Bugger, I was given this gig and I’m not backing out of it.” That’s something about the human spirit that I really like, and it can happen to anyone. I just met Nelson Mandela at this charity thing, and I gave all my money to him—well, not to him, but to his cause.

  Do you get nervous about hosting the Spirit Awards in front of actors and all those people?

  Well, I am an actor, so you know it’s not that. I just want to cut loose. I don’t want to do awards ceremonies. I only do this one because it’s the Independent Spirits. But I won’t do another one after this. This is the last. The first and last one. So we’ll see where it goes. Is it live?

  It’s live. That’s the fun of it. Tell me what else is going on with you. You’re two years from turning 50. What is the next challenge?

  I want to do another drama series and more dramatic films. I loved doing The Riches. You know, I didn’t go to drama school. I was doing accounting and financial management. The Riches was my film school, and it was great. I was in the deep end. With the speed we worked at, I’d have to learn three pages of dialogue in no time at all, and I’d think, This is impossible, and I would panic. And I found that when I panicked, I wouldn’t actually learn the lines. So I realized that the best thing was to just feel the panic coming on, and don’t panic, just learn it.

  Well, you did a great job on that show.

  Ah, I loved it. I’ll do another one like that, but I’m really ready now to get my teeth into it. Something’s changed in the last year or so with my approach. With The Riches, I wanted to do the best work I’d ever done, so I was getting very technical, and sometimes I felt like I wasn’t in the moment. Lots of crap was going in my head. And I said to myself, “Dump the crap, just live in the moment!” And I’ve done a couple of films since then, and I have been much happier with what I’ve seen. That’s what I plan to do.

  You’re someone who is very in control when you do your standup. How is it when you’re being directed in a film and you have no control?

  It’s not that annoying, actually, because I love football, which involves having no control, so it was a natural thing. I love it. I just played last night. I pulled my groin muscle.

  What’s your position?

  Midfield. But a woman in New York is training me to be a striker.

  Maybe you can come and be a part of The Galaxy. With Beckham.

  When I went to South Africa I took footballs over, and I gave them to kids at an orphanage. They started throwing them at each other, and I thought, O.K., they don't want these. But then suddenly they went berserk and they were playing football up and down, and I was playing with them. I think soccer can save the world. Everyone can be good at it. You can be tall, you can be short, you can be white, you can be black—it doesn't matter. It is the ultimate American game, really, because it's a meritocracy, and that's what America is.

  The problem with soccer in America from a business standpoint is that there are no commercial breaks. You watch American football and it’s timeout, commercial, end of quarter, commercial, two-minute warning, commercial. You can’t have that in soccer. You have two 45-minute halves and that's it.

  Yeah, there are problems.

  Maybe you could change that.

  Well, you know who's trying to do it? Rupert Murdoch. His TV channels do more soccer than anyone.

  Are you going to the World Cup?

  I am going to be there for the last game, and if I can get there earlier I will. I love playing football more than watching it, but I’m a very bad loser. If Crystal Palace or England loses, I can’t deal with it. I'm just a child again.

  I have one more question, and it’s about your mom. As we see in Believe, your drive is incredible. All that focus and all that insane energy—do you feel that it comes in part from having lost your mom?

  That scene towards the end of the movie [long pause as he collects himself]—it was an odd moment, because I wasn't actually talking with a conscious brain. I was talking from my subconscious, and I didn't know what I was saying as I was saying it. I had never actually experienced that before—or since. But it’s true—if she hadn't gone away [long pause], then I wouldn't need to do all this. It's just desperation for love, is what it is.

• Independant - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/eddie-izzard-interview-the-comedian-wants-to-pursue-a-parliamentary-seat-in-2020-but-what-exactly-is-a6801791.html

  NewsPeopleProfiles
  Eddie Izzard interview: The comedian wants to pursue a parliamentary seat in 2020 - but what exactly is his vision?
  If he ever stops touring (and running marathons), Eddie Izzard just might get his political career off the ground

  Craig Mclean Friday 8 January 2016 21:52 GMT31 comments

  167

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  The Independent Online

  Eddie Izzard photographed at the The Langham, Club Lounge at the Langham Hotel, central London, December 2015 Hamish Brown
  Eddie Izzard is known to wear his heart on his fingernails. This has lately meant clacking red talons and – painted just so – the Union flag adorning one finger, and the flag of the European Union adorning another. So how come, on the afternoon we meet, the comedian has just gone for red fingernails, minus the flags? "When I'm touring it's difficult to get manicurists who have the ability to paint the fine stars and the fine stripes," he explains. "I also just like having red nails. But when I campaign, they will be back in."

  Izzard the campaigner is now as much a part of him as Izzard the comedian. He supported Andy Burnham in the Labour leadership contest last year, and he has his sights set on becoming an MP. So let's get straight down to political business. As a card-carrying Labour Party member, would he have been one of those who defied Jeremy Corbyn and supported Britain carrying out air strikes in Syria?

  "I think Isil are like the Nazis," replies this Second World War history buff, echoing the words Hilary Benn used in the Commons debate on the issue. "And we fought strongly back against the Nazis. We had to get rid of them. It's a twisted ideology. I think Isil is an enemy to Islam – Islam says thou shalt not kill. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing against human rights, against women, it's off the charts."

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  So that means bombing. Does it mean ground troops as well?

  Izzard pauses. "I am not…" he begins. "I know special forces have been put in as advisers. I would agree with that. I would agree that military force needs to be used. To what level I don't know because I'm not right in that situation looking at all the information and what it's possible to do. But I don't believe that we should just let it go. They will be strengthened by the idea that we do nothing. That they murder us with impunity and we do nothing. And their ideology is inhuman. If al-Qaeda says that they're deranged, that these people are too extreme, then that says something huge."

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  We're talking in the The Langham, Club Lounge of the Langham Hotel in central London hotel. Izzard, who is 53, is in full cross-dressing mode: alarmingly crimson lippy, perilously plunging blouse, and fitted jacket, all set off by knee-high black leather Louboutin boots with murderous spike heels. Are they comfortable?

  "Yeah, because he makes them well," he says, referring to the master French shoemaker. For all the riches brought Izzard's way by a perhaps matchless international comedy career, they are not, however, bespoke. "I have very small feet," he explains. "All women's sizes go up to a UK eight, and I'm a seven. And they've got this," he says, tugging at a delicately but robustly stitched stretchy panel on the boots' uppers. He pokes in a finger to demonstrate the give. It's impressive – as is the run of 31 London shows coming up that mark the latest leg of Izzard's Force Majeure world tour. With that trek having begun in spring 2013, it's a feat of stamina to rank with his 2012 achievement of running 43 marathons in 51 days to raise money for Comic Relief.

  Force Majeure has so far taken in 28 countries, and has no end in sight. It's part of the Grand Eddie Izzard Strategy: the desire to boldly go where no comedian has gone before. There are so many countries to play, in so many languages. Having performed in French, German and Spanish, as well as English, he intends learning Russian and Arabic. For Izzard, it's about breaking borders, and breaking records. He's conscious that rock band Thirty Seconds To Mars, led by the actor Jared Leto, were anointed the most widely toured act in the world, having played – by Izzard's count – 51 countries on their last tour. Force Majeure has a way to go, but Izzard is blithely undaunted at the prospect.

  "I've got this weird thing which is, for one thing, making the stuff universal. Anyone would get the references in my show, no matter what the country. And I put the subtitles for 17 different languages on the DVDs. So I think I am an international minor celebrity. Now," he goes on, "minor celebrity is usually seen as a negative. But I think in every major city or big town of the world, I'm somewhat known. Just due to making it accessible, and pushing in a very open way, around the world…"

  5911762.jpg
  On the stump with Jim Murphy, then leader of Scottish Labour (AFP/Getty Images)
  What kind of person would want to do this? Comic Relief's CEO, Kevin Cahill, has first-hand experience of Izzard's unique, personal force majeure. He remembers receiving the phone call suggesting that a comedian, hitherto unknown as any kind of athlete, wanted to run round the UK, carrying the flags of all the home nations. And lo, it came to pass, to the fund-raising tune of £1.15m.

  "When you talk to any of these people like David Walliams or John Bishop or Davina McCall," says Cahill of the other celebrities who have undertaken extreme physical challenges for charity, "high-achievers in their own right, as much as anything you're struck by their sheer natural acumen and determination. And the person who personifies that more than anybody is Eddie. He's just got an iron will. When he sets his mind to something, he's unstoppable. I've never met anyone with quite that force of determination."

  Whence, then, that remarkable ambition? In a 1998 New Yorker profile titled "The Izzard King" – written to mark his becoming the "first comedy act to make the difficult passage across the Atlantic since Dudley Moore and Peter Cook achieved it" – he described himself as "a very lazy person with huge drive". Does that still pertain?

  "Yep," Izzard shoots back, glugging on his second coffee. "It's the oil tanker thing. Once I get going I don't want to stop. Once I stop I don't want to get going." Delving back deeper and further, he cites the loss of his mother to cancer, when he was six, as the event that caused to him to focus on his goals with such laser-like intensity.

  "I mean, there's almost no awards in stand-up," he says, meaning that there are none of the promotional opportunities afforded by events like the Brits and the Oscars and the Grammys. "So I try and do things like I'm claiming 28 countries is a comedy world record."

  Izzard is noticeably absent from the telly panel show circuit that seem to feature eight out of 10 comedians. If he is concerned about stand-up's profile, why not do those? "I have occasionally thought I could do that. But the way I'm doing it is very real. TV things can get pulled and it's, oh, what am I gonna do now? There's a lot of people who've stumbled on that one, or fallen backwards. And I can't stumble on it because I don't have it."

  5911765.jpg
  Izzard in ‘Castles In The Sky’, a 2014 BBC2 drama about the struggle to invent radar in the years leading up to the Second World War
  And for Izzard, failing – or not being in control – just wouldn't do. So he pushes on, on his own terms. He talks about how his roles in big- and small-screen drama are getting better and better, flagging a CV that takes in, among myriad other things, Velvet Goldmine, Ocean's 13, Treasure Island and Hannibal. He tells me about a proposed HBO series about the Salem witch trials. "It got all the way down to the wire and it didn't happen, which was annoying," he says through gritted teeth.

  Then there's Whisky Galore. The remake of the classic British comedy is due in cinemas later this year. It was made by venerable Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon. He also worked with Izzard on Castles In The Sky, a 2014 BBC film in which the actor/comedian played the Second World War boffin Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar. Izzard, MacKinnon recalls, was initially hesitant about starring in Whisky Galore> because of his insistence on pursuing dramatic rather than comedic roles. But MacKinnon thinks Izzard's firm stance on what kind of parts he accepts was not so much about ambition as appetite.

  "Eddie's just terribly hungry to do things," he says. "On both my films he did [stand-up] shows for the crew. And I said to him that him onstage was just like him on set, but with the volume turned up 10 times. And he said something quite interesting: 'I spent 10 years on the street doing theatre and comedy, learning how to stop an audience walking away from me. That was a very long apprenticeship. And the main thing I learned was the comedy was much better when I was just simply myself.'"

  So it's him being him, on his own. All of this, fundamentally, is a solo mission. Is there a loneliness of the long-distance runner (who also happens to be a comedian)? "It could be, for some people," Izzard shrugs. "But I'm a bit of a lone wolf. And lone wolves are very rarely lonely. I don't quite know why that is. I think I have a relationship with the audience… I'm fairly compact. Yeah," he frowns, "I can't quite work that one out. But yeah, I can see some people having difficulty with it."

  5911761.jpg
  Izzard is smart, passionate, engaged, warm, human. But to a lot of the electorate he might just seem too, well, out there. (Hamish Brown)
  Is he institutionally single then?

  "Relationship-wise? Oh, this old chestnut," he says slightly wearily. For the record, he is heterosexual and currently single. "No, relationships are tricky. If you're trans[vestite] and you're touring a lot, it's difficult to put it together. 'Cause I'm choosy and someone else will be choosy." Pause. "Yeah, it's difficult to get everything working perfectly."

  Izzard first walked out of the door wearing a dress in 1985. For most of the subsequent years his occasional public transvestism was largely met with, at best, puzzlement; at worst, hostility and violence. But in recent years, there has been an increase in societal tolerance and awareness around many areas that used to be subject to widespread discrimination. Izzard is strongly supportive of LGBT rights and delighted at the advancements made in the past year in the public acceptance of people with non-conventional gender identities.

  So what did Izzard make of Germaine Greer saying she didn't care if a man had gender reassignment – that it still wouldn't make him a woman? He thinks for a moment before choosing his words slowly. "I don't agree with her. Not having been born a woman, she might feel it's not my right to think. But from a human being point of view, and from an LGBT point of view, I don't think that's the right way to see it.

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  "The obsession we have of the differences between men and women is the problem. If there's a tiger, we just say, 'look at that tiger.' We don't give a flying fuck what gender it is, actually," he says with some feeling. "Or, cats and dogs," he continues, a familiar comedy muscle starting to twitch. "You don't say to someone, 'nice cat. Girl cat or boy cat?' 'It's a girl cat.' 'Oh, right. Nice girl cat.' 'Actually I was having you on, it's a boy cat.' 'Oh, right…' 'No, actually it's a girl cat.'"

  He's not sure that anyone, feminist or otherwise, should be building more walls. "I don't know how that's very helpful. I don't see what is the big problem. If Germaine feels [a trans woman] is not a woman – yeah, she hasn't had periods. But if we could get it going that they could have periods, would that work? I don't think trans people are choosing not to have periods and not to have babies. I just think, we haven't worked out how to do it." In sum, he concludes, "I think it's a fight we don't need to be having. Can't we spend our time fighting for other things? Like equal pay."

  It's difficult to see what kind of politician Eddie Izzard would be. He's professionally progressive, but personally opaque. He's smart, passionate, engaged, warm, human. But to a lot of the electorate he might just seem too, well, out there.

  He says that he supports Sadiq Khan in the upcoming London mayoral election – at one point he was hopeful that he himself might run on the Labour ticket in 2020 – so he's now thinking that he'll pursue a parliamentary seat at the next general election. Are his prospects looking good?

  5911764.jpg
  Izzard has plenty of marathons under his belt – but still not enough (Rex Features)
  "Oh no, I'm not actively right this second going: 'Is it free? Quick, get on the phone. What do I have to do?'" he clarifies briskly of his desire for a seat. "I just know that's where I've got to go. And maybe I can't get one. I might not be able to get one. I might go for one and not get the nomination. I might get the nomination but not win the seat in the election. But in 2020 that's my plan. So I will try and do what I can to get there. I'm quite determined, but there are systems and rules.

  "The great thing about stand-up is I can say, 'hey, I want to go and play France…' Well, it took me a long bloody time but I got to play France. Maybe that's what happens in politics. It might take me a deal of time. I know that my starts are never easy."

  He refuses to give the Corybn leadership marks out of 10. "I don't know if that's really helpful…" he says carefully. "Because that then becomes a thing that can go in the media… Yeah, I will pass on that one." But equally, he's not about to follow fellow comedian Robert Webb and quit the party in a dispute over the behaviour of Corbynistas.

  "I don't see the merit in that. I would never box myself in a corner and say 'I'm never gonna do this' or 'I'm always gonna do that.' The big parties have a distinct spread of viewpoints. So, no, I think if a number of people have voted for him, and it was a sizeable number, let's see what he does and what he wants to do."

  And what does Eddie Izzard want to do next? After the extended London engagement, is there some long overdue time off? No chance. The man whom MacKinnon describes as being like "an express train – he never stops" has another destination in mind.

  "I might be running." For Comic Relief? "Yeah. I've got to go back to South Africa." In 2012 Izzard planned to follow his round-Britain run with a trip to South Africa to run 27 marathons in 27 days, honouring Nelson Mandela by geographically tracing his life, raising money for the Nelson Mandela Foundation and other South African charities. But he had to pull out after four marathons, for health reasons. Seems he's still hurting.

  "It's annoying. I don't like saying I'm gonna do something, and failing. So I have to go back. And there's also believability. I'm like, did I really do that? Was that me? And can I do that again?"

  As ever, don't bet against, or vote against, Izzard.

• The Hollywood Reporter - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bookmark/eddie-izzard-reflects-coming-as-transgender-why-caitlyn-jenner-is-a-role-model-1012926

  QUOTE:
  Fame does make it easier for me. But then again, I am quite well known in America, but I can find you a lot of places where they wouldn’t know me and I am just some transgender guy going into the loo or shops. But fame can also help some young kid, because he can say, "I am like that person there." As a positive role model, that’s where I see fame helping. Like Caitlyn Jenner. Now, her politics are not so good. She’s very slow on getting onto gay marriage — but still, a lot of people in America can now talk about it because it's further out there in the public domain, so that has to be a good thing.
  JUNE 13, 2017 10:43am PT by Christina Schoellkopf

  Eddie Izzard Reflects on Coming Out as Transgender, Why Caitlyn Jenner Is a Role Model
  The comedian also recalls working with Robin Williams on his first feature film: "That was a beautiful moment, just to hang out with him."
  John Phillips/Getty Images
  Eddie Izzard

  The comedian also recalls working with Robin Williams on his first feature film: "That was a beautiful moment, just to hang out with him."
  Eddie Izzard wears many hats: stand-up comedian, thespian, film actor and marathon runner, to name a few. In his new memoir Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens, however, he focuses on one of his many hyphenates most prominently: transgender activist.

  The 55-year-old, whose Hollywood credits include The LEGO Batman Movie, Valkyrie, Across the Universe and Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen, writes of how acceptance of the transgender community has changed since he first came out in the 1980s. Izzard identifies as transgender, but describes having both a "boy and girl mode."

  As his book hits shelves Tuesday, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to the British comedian and actor about his take on transgender issues in Hollywood today, Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox as role models, and what it was like to work with Robin Williams.

  How did coming out years ago help you with other challenges in your career and personal life?

  If you are coming out as transgender or gay or lesbian, it’s such a tough rite of passage and quest. It assaults your senses because, back in ‘85, everyone said, “No, no. Hide about it.” I just thought they were all wrong. The humiliation period, the initial period, is so tough. If you keep at it, it gets better.

  What do you find most difficult about using a women's restroom today and where do you stand on the gender-neutral bathroom debate?

  If you just take out urinals, then everyone can use them. You can solve it right now. Just rip them all out. Lets share so everyone is equal. It gets rid of so many things in one fell swoop.

  You write of people possibly being more accepting of you because of your charitable marathons and acting career. What role do you think fame plays in the acceptance of transgender people?

  Fame does make it easier for me. But then again, I am quite well known in America, but I can find you a lot of places where they wouldn’t know me and I am just some transgender guy going into the loo or shops. But fame can also help some young kid, because he can say, "I am like that person there." As a positive role model, that’s where I see fame helping. Like Caitlyn Jenner. Now, her politics are not so good. She’s very slow on getting onto gay marriage — but still, a lot of people in America can now talk about it because it's further out there in the public domain, so that has to be a good thing. One of the greatest activists is an African-American woman who is on Orange Is the New Black, Laverne Cox. What she had to go through has been very tough. We do what we can, we soldier on, and we try to find positives in the negatives.

  What is your take on cisgender actors playing transgender roles? You have years of experience in the opposite position: a transgender actor playing cisgender roles. How would you like to see the transgender community accepted more in and out of Hollywood?

  Hollywood will be that way until money is made. I am trying to have my cake and eat it, because I am essentially transgender. I have boy mode and girl mode. I do feel I have boy genetics and girl genetics. I have played one transgender character. I will play hopefully more transgender roles in the future, but there are a lot of boy genetics in me so I am happy to play boy roles. It would be great if more transgender actors can play more transgender characters. But the trouble with Hollywood is they have to see money, or some financial incentive in doing it. It would be driven to make a profit first because it is show business. But remember when gay and lesbian characters didn’t even exist, they couldn’t kiss? We have come a long way, so let’s keep forging our way forward.

  You credit much of your success to "self-belief." How did that lead you to some of your movie and TV gigs?

  My self-belief has helped me get things going in these two careers. I am now doing Victoria and Abdul with Judi Dench, and I am also touring as a stand-up comic in France, speaking French, and Germany, speaking in German. I am about to perform in Spanish in Central and South America.

  What acting experience stands out to you?

  It was wonderful to do a small cameo in Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen. Hanging out with those guys was a wonderful thing. In Ocean’s Thirteen, we had all these scenes of just me, George [Clooney] and Brad [Pitt]. It was nice to be included. I love film.

  You made your big-screen debut with Robin Williams in 1996's The Secret Agent. What do you treasure most about that experience?

  Yes! Just to hang out with Robin was such a crazy thing. So sad about Robin. That very first moment, to walk up to this guy that you have studied in a stand-up workshop and say, “Mr. Robin Williams," and hear him say, "Mr. Eddie Izzard" back to me, was quite a moment. I think we have a number of things that were similar in the way we worked, but I just liked the guy. I am sorry he was being tormented at the end and I didn’t know. But that was a beautiful moment, just to hang out with him there. I went to his house and hung out with him and his family. I would not have expected him to know my name. I don’t know how he knew, he must have looked at the cast list and found out one of them was a stand-up. Crazy.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/01/01/574986014/encore-eddie-izzard-talks-about-coming-out

  MUSIC INTERVIEWS
  Encore: Eddie Izzard Talks About Coming Out

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  January 1, 20184:42 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Kelly McEvers
  KELLY MCEVERS

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  Kelly McEvers interviews entertainer Eddie Izzard. This story was originally broadcast on All Things Considered, June 20, 2017.

  Eddie Izzard: Coming Out Gave Me The Confidence For Everything Else
  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  Eddie Izzard: Coming Out Gave Me The Confidence For Everything Else
  KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

  And before I say goodbye to 2017, I want to talk one more time about jazz chickens. Comedian Eddie Izzard was here with me in the studio earlier this year to talk about his book "Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, And Jazz Chickens." And we talked about a lot of stuff. We couldn't get everything in, so I wanted to share it again and include the part about the tigers and some other things that didn't make it the first time around. So yes, there will be tigers. And first - jazz chickens.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

  EDDIE IZZARD: Cows go roo (ph). Sheep go meh (ph). Ducks go quack. Pigs go oink, all of them. Chickens go cockle-doodle-do (ph) unless you wedge a trumpet on their face.

  MCEVERS: If you are a fan of Izzard's surreal standup comedy, you probably can tell where this is going.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

  IZZARD: (Imitating trumpet). Farmer's wife going, what's that? That's jazz chicken.

  (LAUGHTER)

  IZZARD: We bought a jazz chicken? No, it's the old chicken but a trumpet fell on his face.

  (LAUGHTER)

  IZZARD: What do you mean fell on his face? Well, I wedged it on there. I couldn't stand the cock-a-doodle-do, cock-a-doodle-do all times of day and night. I thought, let's make it jazz.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

  MCEVERS: Eddie Izzard - comedian, actor, writer - joins me now here in the studio. Jazz chickens is in the title but not in the book. I mean, was that supposed to be true?

  IZZARD: They said, there's got to be something funny in there. I do talk about love and death. And jazz chickens is just there to be funny in a way.

  MCEVERS: And as much as we're laughing, it's a serious book. You start with the day that you say your childhood ended, the day your mother died of cancer - March 4, 1968. You were 6 years old.

  IZZARD: Yeah. It was an unusual thing. Mom and dad decided not to say that this cancer was going to kill her. And then one day, she was gone. And yeah, it doesn't get better. You just put layers and layers over it.

  MCEVERS: At some point, and I don't know if it's in that chapter or later, but you write that ever since she died, you feel like, in a way, you've been trying to bring her back.

  IZZARD: Well, if I can really do enough interesting things, maybe it will cut through. I just think unfortunately we live and then we die and then that's it, kids. So I don't think mom can come back. And I think she would've got a message back, you know. Truly, one person would have got a message back over the eons and eons of time - 10,000 years of civilization - just one.

  MCEVERS: One email.

  IZZARD: If one - yeah - one message, one clouds pull aside and it's me, Janine (ph). I died last Tuesday. Anyway, it's great. They get massages up here, and God's nice. He's a bit full of himself but all right. You know, they're all hanging out here. Everyone gets on. It's great. Be nice and you come up here, if not, you go down and it's smelly and it's horrible. It's all cold and hot at the same time.

  MCEVERS: So obviously, yeah, you don't mean you would actually bring her back. But you said, like, if you just keep doing enough things.

  IZZARD: Yeah. And they're not scatter gun. It's not like, and then I'm going to be a stamp collector, be the most brilliant stamp collector. These are just things that I wanted to do. Remember when we were teenagers, we would all go - I'm going to be an astronaut, no, a beekeeper, no, one of the other. Or you had a few things usually on the boil there. And I've just kept those on the - sort of simmering in the back of my mind. And then I brought a number of them forward like drama and surreal comedy and then playing Hollywood Bowl, doing gigs. I went off to do gigs in Spanish in Madrid and Barcelona, do it in Espanol. And now I can go around America doing it in English and...

  MCEVERS: And Spanish.

  IZZARD: ...Espanol.

  MCEVERS: Because this is a thing that runs through the book. You worked really hard but you also had this confidence that you could do what you wanted to do, right? Some people call it chutzpah. I think you call it pigheadedness.

  IZZARD: Yeah.

  MCEVERS: Where does it come from? I mean, I feel like I want to be able to bottle and sell it, but I want to know where it...

  IZZARD: It was locked in from coming out in 1985, coming up 32 years ago as transgender or - I was TV when I came out. The language has changed over the years - transvestite, TV, transsexual, TS. We are now at trans and transgender. So I came out in 1985, and it was very difficult to go out and forge your way out and lock it into your life. Once I did that and I pushed back on all that fear and hatred and the feelings that society all around the world was saying to me - you're not allowed to do this. This is wrong. And I'm saying, it's built into my genetics. And I think I have girl genetics and boy genetics, so I'm going to express them. I'm not going to feel shame or guilt. And that has given me the confidence for everything else.

  MCEVERS: And you do talk about, though, there's - you have girl mode and boy mode.

  IZZARD: Yeah. That's just an articulation of it. If I'm in boy mode, I'm going to look more boyish. Girl mode, I probably look like a boy who's more in girl mode. I use boy-girl as opposed to man-woman. Man-woman is much heavier, more leadened. We obsess about it. Young boys and young girls - very similar. Older men, older women look very similar. Tigers, we have no idea. If you're being savaged by a tiger, you would not say, is this a boy tiger or a girl tiger? We're obsessed about our sexuality - our sexualities. But other animals don't give a monkeys about it. They will - if they're a big tiger, they will attack you. They won't go, is this a man or a woman that I'm attacking? They just go attack.

  MCEVERS: I want to talk about your process too about writing about how you come up with some of your bits. I want to listen to....

  IZZARD: Can't call them bits.

  MCEVERS: Oh, sorry.

  IZZARD: I think they're scenes. I know. There's an American standup-language thing. They say, I've got this bit. And it just sounds...

  MCEVERS: It makes it sound pretty small.

  IZZARD: Yes. It sounds - like I got this bit where I talk about the existence of eternity. I mean, you know, it sounds like someone has forced us to say I've got a bit. No, I've got a nice piece of comedy. I've got a little scene. I've got a little story.

  MCEVERS: We're going to banish the bit. Let's talk about one of your scenes. You're talking about something extremely mundane, about how software automatically updates. You know, when you're sitting at your computer and the software is like, oh, do you want to have an automatic update? You're like, yes, please, update. Thank you. Let's listen to that.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

  IZZARD: No one in this room has read the terms and conditions.

  (LAUGHTER)

  IZZARD: Even the people who wrote it didn't read it.

  (LAUGHTER)

  IZZARD: Anything could be there. We will take your buttocks and sell them to the Chinese. Fine. Swap your knees out? Yes. So let's tape your buttocks to the hot part of a tractor. OK. Put your big toe on your thumbs and swap them out. Yes, yes. And then you get the update and nothing's changed.

  (LAUGHTER)

  MCEVERS: So process-wise, is that you, you know, sitting at home at your computer, the update actually happens and you think to yourself, I'm going to write a scene about this or...

  IZZARD: No. It's even more lucid than that. It's actually on stage. Like if I was doing that, I would be on stage talking about something else or something close to it. And then I think, that terms - we don't read it, do we? No one reads it. Do you read it? And you suddenly realize there's a whole lot of areas I can go there. So I just start ad-libbing on the stage. Everything is verbal sculpting. I verbally sculpt from there. So the next night, I will expand upon it more. And I will say, sell my buttocks to the Chinese, whatever it is, you know. And you get this energy that goes into it, and the audience really reacts to the energy.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING0

  IZZARD: If you have a PC, I think it's a very similar thing. You open the computer. You switch on the computer. You put the handle in and you turn the handle.

  So I write down some ideas in the Notes section of my iPhone. And then I go on stage and I develop them. And I developed "Force Majeure," my latest show, in LA and San Francisco and New York. And I will do that in Paris. And that'll be a salute to France and voting in President Macron. And I'm very positive on Europe. We have to make the world work. Otherwise, this century, it's going to be our century - the first century for the rest of eternity where humanity really gets as fair as possible. Or it's the last century and goodbye humanity.

  MCEVERS: Wow. Eddie Izzard, thank you.

  IZZARD: Thank you. Cheers.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  MCEVERS: Eddie Izzard. I talked to him back in June. He is performing in France this month in French, says so on his website - in French. His Believe Me tour comes to the U.S. in February.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2017/06/20/533684713/eddie-izzard-coming-out-gave-me-the-confidence-for-everything-else

  QUOTE:
  I was "TV" when I came out, the language has changed over the years — transvestite/TV, transsexual/TS — we are now at transgender. So, I came out in 1985, and it was very difficult to go out and forge a way out and lock it into your life. Once I did that, once I pushed back on all that fear and hatred and the feelings that society all around the world was saying to me, "You're not allowed to do this, this is wrong," and I'm saying it's built into my genetics and I think I have girl genetics and boy genetics, so I'm going to express them, I'm not going to feel shame or guilt, and that has given me the confidence for everything else.
  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  Eddie Izzard: Coming Out Gave Me The Confidence For Everything Else

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  June 20, 20174:40 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Kelly McEvers
  KELLY MCEVERS

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  Believe Me
  Believe Me
  A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

  by Eddie Izzard

  Hardcover, 348 pages purchase

  Before we can talk about Eddie Izzard's new memoir, Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens, we have to talk about the jazz chickens. Because of course, cows go "moo," sheep go "baa," and a chicken will cock-a-doodle-doo — unless you get tired of the racket and jam a trumpet over its head.

  Full disclosure: There are no actual jazz chickens in the book. "They said there's gotta be something funny in there," Izzard tells me. "I do talk about love and death, and 'jazz chickens' is just there to be funny, in a way." And it's true: There are some very somber moments in Believe Me.

  Interview Highlights
  On his mother's death

  It was an unusual thing ... Mum and Dad decided not to say that this cancer was going to kill her. And then one day she was gone, and, yeah, it doesn't get better. You just put layers and layers over it.

  I'm trying to do all these things, because if I do enough, maybe she'll come back ... if I can really do enough interesting things, maybe it'll cut through to the other side. Now, I don't believe in a god — I just think unfortunately that we live and then we die, and then that's it, kids. So I don't think Mum can come back — I think she would have got a message back, you know? Surely one person would have got a message back over the eons and eons of time, 10,000 years of civilization! Just one! One message, one cloud to pull aside and say, "It's me, Janine! I died last Tuesday. Anyway, it's great, they get massages up here, and God's nice, he's a bit full of himself, but alright. They're all hanging out here, everyone gets on, it's great. Be nice, and you'll end up here, if not you go down and it's smelly and it's horrible, it's all cold and hot at the same time."

  On his "pigheadedness"

  Cake Or Death? Gâteau, S'il Vous Plaît!
  ARTS & LIFE
  Cake Or Death? Gâteau, S'il Vous Plaît!
  It was locked in from coming out in 1985, coming out as transgender, or, I was "TV" when I came out, the language has changed over the years — transvestite/TV, transsexual/TS — we are now at transgender. So, I came out in 1985, and it was very difficult to go out and forge a way out and lock it into your life. Once I did that, once I pushed back on all that fear and hatred and the feelings that society all around the world was saying to me, "You're not allowed to do this, this is wrong," and I'm saying it's built into my genetics and I think I have girl genetics and boy genetics, so I'm going to express them, I'm not going to feel shame or guilt, and that has given me the confidence for everything else.

  On the way he develops his routines

  I just start ad-libbing on the stage. Everything is verbal sculpting ... you get this energy that goes into it, and the audience really reacts to the energy. But then after a while, you can get it locked down, and if you get it precisely, "Oh, I'm going to use these jokes in this section," and then it starts become leaden, and then I thought, if I always keep it molten, it will always be live. So I write down some ideas in the notes section of my iPhone, and then I go onstage and I develop them.

QUOTE:
Izzard's many fans will enjoy his reflections, less outlandish
than expected and more rueful than boastful.
Print Marked Items
Izzard , Eddie: BELIEVE ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Izzard , Eddie BELIEVE ME Blue Rider Press (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 6, 13 ISBN: 978-0-399-17583-1
The cross-dressing, multilingual comic speaks on matters from "the basic bloke-in-a-dress look" to
international affairs.Born in the British protectorate of Aden in 1962, Izzard claims he is "a really boring
person" who just happens to have swallowed several libraries' worth of books and lived a fairly interesting,
if sometimes difficult, life. His mother died when he was very young, leaving it to a put-upon father and the
English school system to raise him; he tends to divide the world into the time "before Mum died" and all the
rest of it. One consequence: Izzard is an adamant atheist who holds that if there is anything like a god, then
that deity has some explaining to do on matters such as "WWII, Hitler, bowel cancer, and Croc shoes." Croc
shoes may be one thing, but the author's own garb of plastic trousers, frock or kimono, and black eyeliner
was a choice that resulted from an effort to bring the glam aesthetic of David Bowie et al. to the comedy
stage. Izzard charts a tough trajectory, from the first glimmers of a career at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
35-odd years ago to a kind of niche superstardom that has put him in concert films, dramatic and comedic
movie roles, and other vehicles. Unusually, too, he has taken to performing comedy routines in several
European languages, as a statement of universality and fraternity. Here, apart from recounting that path, he
takes the opportunity to philosophize--earnestly and much less humorously than one might expect--on many
issues of the day, from transgender rights to the struggle to replace pessimism with optimism in a time of
hatred and fear. "Despair is the fuel of terrorism," he writes, "and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have
to put more hope into the world than despair." Izzard's many fans will enjoy his reflections, less outlandish
than expected and more rueful than boastful.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Izzard , Eddie: BELIEVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002836/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7b3096f5.
Accessed 8 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002836

QUOTE:
the
book is both funny and painful, and ultimately uplifting.
Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and
Jazz Chickens
Publishers Weekly.
264.17 (Apr. 24, 2017): p79+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens
Eddie Izzard, with Laura Zigman. Blue Rider, $28 (280p) ISBN 978-0-399-17583-1
Beloved comedian, actor, and writer Izzard, known partly for being an "out" transvestite who sometimes
wears dresses, heels, and lipstick on stage, shares intimate details about his life and is emotionally
transparent throughout this splendid memoir. Born in Yemen to English parents, Izzard moved with his
family back to the U.K. when he was young. There he had a happy childhood until his beloved mother died
of cancer when he was six. This trauma, Izzard explains, pushed him, with the magical thinking that it
would somehow bring his mother back, relentlessly toward a successful career in show business. He writes
about coming to terms with his gender identity and recognizing that he was transgender at a young age, but
told no one for nearly two decades. As his star began to rise, Izzard grew confident enough to dress as a
woman on stage. Whether recounting his boarding-school shenanigans, his struggles with dyslexia, or his
work with Sports Relief U.K. over the years (including last year when he ran 27 marathons in 27 days), the
book is both funny and painful, and ultimately uplifting. (June)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 79+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250854/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b7795031. Accessed 8 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491250854

"Izzard , Eddie: BELIEVE ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002836/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 8 Jan. 2018. "Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens." Publishers Weekly, 24 Apr. 2017, p. 79+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491250854/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 8 Jan. 2018.

• Gates Notes
  https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Believe-Me
  Word count: 1109

  QUOTE:
  I’m always impressed by the growth mindset when I see it in action. Now that I understand how much it’s at the core of Eddie’s brilliance on stage, I’ve become an even more devoted fan of his.

  Eddie Izzard is a comic genius
  By Bill Gates | December 4, 2017
  I’ve recently discovered that I have a lot in common with a funny, dyslexic, transgender actor, comedian, escape artist, unicyclist, ultra-marathoner, and pilot from Great Britain. Except all of the above.

  Eddie Izzard is one of my favorite performers. Melinda and I had the pleasure of seeing one of his comedy shows live in London, and then we got to talk with him backstage after the show. So I was excited to pick up his autobiography, Believe Me. It was there that I learned for the first time that Izzard and I share a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses.

  As a child, Eddie was nerdy, awkward, and incompetent at flirting with girls. He had terrible handwriting. He was good at math. He was highly motivated to learn everything he could about subjects that interested him. He left college at age 19 to pursue his professional dreams. He had a loving mom who died of cancer way too young.

  I can relate to every one of these things.

  You might find you share similarities with Eddie as well. In fact, that’s the overarching point of this book. We’re all cut from the same cloth. In his words, “We are all totally different, but we are all exactly the same.”

  If you’ve never seen Eddie perform his stand-up routine, you’re missing out. Like Monty Python, he often draws from real historical figures, such as Shakespeare or Charlemagne, and comes up with hilarious riffs, many of them improvised. And like other super talented comedians like Robin Williams and Tom Hanks, he’s also great in serious dramatic roles. (He recently appeared in the movie Victoria and Abdul, with Dame Judi Dench.) He even talks semi-seriously about running for Parliament.

  Despite all those gifts, I’m not sure I’d recommend this book for those who’ve never seen Eddie perform. There are some comedians, such as David Sedaris and George Carlin, whose books would make perfect sense even if you haven’t seen their act. That’s not the case here. You have to witness his brand of surreal, intellectual, self-deprecating humor. Otherwise, it will be like you’re walking into the middle of a conversation.

  But if you have seen Eddie’s stuff and you like it—here’s a typical bit, a riff on Pavlov’s dogs—I promise you’ll love this book. You’ll see that his written voice is very similar to his stage voice. You’ll also see that the book provides not just laugh-out-loud moments but also a lot of touching insights into how little Edward Izzard, a kid with only a hint of performing talent, became an international star.

  The book begins with the event that had by far the biggest impact on his life—the death of his mom in 1968, when Eddie was just six years old. Eddie’s father, an accountant who traveled a lot for work, was not able to care for Eddie and his brother by himself. So the Izzard boys were sent off to a boarding school near a Welsh seaside resort “where you’d expect a few dead bodies to wash up occasionally … but no such luck.” Imagine you’re six years old, you’ve just lost your mom, you’re starting to have gender-identity issues that make no sense to you, and you’re packed away to a boarding school where you have to cry yourself to sleep!

  As hard as these experiences were, there’s no way Eddie would be the star he is today if they hadn’t happened. “I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because … on some childlike magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back. But she never came back. I keep trying, though, just in case.”

  He’s honest about the fact that he was the opposite of a natural. Instead of innate talent, he had something perhaps more important: a burning desire to be in show business and the propensity to be relentless in pursuit of his goals.

  He spent most of the 1980s working as a street performer, often in London’s Covent Garden. It was a slog, with a lot of embarrassing moments. But he got much better the old-fashioned way: by working at it day in and day out and learning from his many failures.

  In fact, I couldn’t help but think that Eddie’s life would be a perfect case study for the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who has written about the concept of the “growth mindset.” As Dweck explains in her book Mindset, the growth mindset is one in which you believe that your capabilities derive from practice and perseverance rather than DNA and destiny.

  Eddie has the growth mindset in spades. Being lousy at something doesn’t stop him from doing it. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, driving him to work at it until he is no longer terrified of it.

  Not only did he apply that to performing in front of huge audiences, despite his fundamental shyness. That growth mindset also drove him to become a pilot, despite his fear of heights. It drove him to run 27 marathons in 27 days, despite his lack of natural athleticism. And it drove him to start performing stand-up in French, German, Arabic, Russian, and Spanish, despite the difficulty of learning these languages and translating his British humor into other cultural contexts.

  Maybe most difficult of all, that growth mindset allowed him to walk out the door of his home in 1985 in makeup and a dress, despite opening himself up to ridicule and hate. But doing so was liberating: “It led to … a world I could begin to change in my own personal way, carving out for myself a small slice of freedom of expression.”

  I’m always impressed by the growth mindset when I see it in action. Now that I understand how much it’s at the core of Eddie’s brilliance on stage, I’ve become an even more devoted fan of his.

• Express Online
  https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/820043/Believe-Me-Eddie-Izzard-Book-review
  Word count: 699

  QUOTE:
  Believe Me is like one of his sell-out comedy shows: creative, witty, sharp, dazzling but with too little of Izzard himself in it.
  I wanted Izzard to be more personal, more confessional. He is a remarkable person but he pulls down the dressing gown far too early on anything that might give too much away.

  Believe Me by Eddie Izzard: Book review
  3 / 5 stars
  Believe Me by Eddie Izzard
  EDDIE Izzard had theatrical ambitions as a child. He even created his own teddy bear theatre after playing with the belt of his dressing gown and discovering that he could make the dressing gown rise like a theatrical curtain.
  By CLAIRE WOODWARD
  PUBLISHED: 00:01, Fri, Jun 23, 2017

  Eddie IzzardPH

  Eddie Izzard is an actor, marathon runner, Labour supporter and champion of alternative sexuality
  Believe Me by Eddie Izzard, Michael Joseph, £20

  So does the revered comic actor, marathon runner, Labour supporter and champion of alternative sexuality raise the curtain on the rest of his rather fantastic life and give personal insights into what goes on in his multi-talented brain? Not enough for my liking.

  Izzard is a major cultural figure, not only because of his talents as a stand-up comedian but for the way he has spoken out about being transgender and transvestite. He was also one of the first public figures to do so.

  RELATED ARTICLES
  WATCH: Shock moment man in balaclava steals Eddie Izzard's EU hat
  Eddie Izzard wasted more than £36k on trying to keep Britain in EU
  It would have been fascinating to see more of the private Izzard revealed. However, Believe Me is like one of his sell-out comedy shows: creative, witty, sharp, dazzling but with too little of Izzard himself in it.

  Izzard’s mother died when he was six and he writes at length about growing up without her and how her death has left a deep impression on him to this day.

  “Everything I do in life is trying to get her back,” he says. He writes at length about his days at public school, reveals a surprising teenage fascination with the SAS and shares his love of playing football.

  Izzard also writes beautifully about his hunger to make it as an actor and comedian and the years of groundwork he put in as a street performer and on the London stand-up circuit to make it happen.

  Eddie Izzard has his hat stolen at pro-EU protest
  Play Video
  It is a salutary lesson to any wannabe comic who thinks they can become a big star overnight. It is all entertaining enough but the book really comes to life when Izzard, who says that he is “still shy”, opens up about himself and the causes which mean a lot to him.

  It is incredibly endearing when he writes that goodlooking people have no struggle with making relationships but he declares that “struggle is good...

  EddieGETTY

  Comedian Eddie on the red carpet
  I will spin this scary thing around and decide that if I can learn to do this thing that is terrifying, then I will get to a place where it no longer terrifies me.” Izzard is frighteningly bold and this is a lovely part of his autobiography: the empowerment that comes from facing up to your fears and making them less scary.

  It takes guts to face up to a bunch of 13-year-old girls on your first public outing dressed in women’s clothes or to banish your fear of flying by becoming a pilot or to run around Britain for Sport Relief with barely any training. His comedy schtick comes over well on the page and the use of copious footnotes reflects his stand-up style of going off at many tangents.

  But I wanted Izzard to be more personal, more confessional. He is a remarkable person but he pulls down the dressing gown far too early on anything that might give too much away.

  Related articles

• Popdust
  https://www.popdust.com/eddie-izzard-believe-me-review-2436062474.html
  Word count: 818

  QUOTE:
  If you are a fan of Eddie Izzard, then you will love this book. If you are not a fan of Eddie Izzard, then there is a good chance that this book will make you one. The experience is akin to him sitting down and having a chat with you, which, we can all agree, sounds delightful. His life is fascinating, his insights direct and unpretentious, and his sense of humor infallible.
  REVIEW | Eddie Izzard's 'Believe Me' is thoughtful, funny, and heartbreaking
  LITERATURE | In his first autobiography, Eddie Izzard talks candidly about the death of his mother, coming out as transgender, and his fascinating career

  Like PopDust on Facebook
  Thomas Burns Scully
  At ten pages in, Eddie Izzard's Believe Me made me cry. He opens the book, talking about the death of his mother. On hearing the news he writes "Me, Mark and Daddy just cry for between half an hour and a lifetime." A turn of phrase so delicate and full to the brim with childhood grief that it's hard to believe this is the same man who does an impression of Darth Vader ordering spaghetti in the Death Star canteen. Izzard has proven time and again that he is formidably funny, and his acting work has demonstrated his flair for the dramatic, but here we learn that he also has a deft hand for prose.

  If you are unfamiliar with Eddie Izzard, then really you owe it to yourself to go and watch a few clips of him on YouTube. Apart from being a prominent stand-up comedian for the last twenty years, almost universally lauded for his surreal humor; he is an actor, transgender activist, charitable marathon runner, and occasional representative of the UK Labor Party. All of this gets covered in Believe Me. This is his first autobiography, but, as you would likely expect, his years of writing standup have given him ample ability for negotiating the written word.

  "What you end up with is a loose manual on 'How To Be Eddie Izzard'. Though individual results will likely vary."
  What is surprisingly unsurprising about the way Izzard writes, is that his voice comes through the text so clearly. If you have seen his standup then the tone and syntax will make you feel right at home. He is able to switch between the frivolous and the dourly serious and back before you've even noticed what's happened. The book also features many of his signature diversions, where he will side-track himself for comic effect, or to add additional context. He will sometimes do this in-text, and at other times using footnotes. It is occasionally distracting in this print form, but it also feels authentic to the Eddie that we have all come to love over the years.

  This is most definitely not an autobiography in the 'tell-all, who was sleeping with whom' vein. Izzard's writing is far too scientific in approach for that. He is an adroit self-documentarian, constantly analyzing his experiences, probing them for meaning, considering three or four different rationales. He admits to this directly in the text, quoting his fascination with the Nuffield Syllabus, and how he has, accidentally or no, lived his life somewhat in accordance with its principles. What you end up with, then, is a loose manual on 'How To Be Eddie Izzard'. Though individual results will likely vary.

  It is, of course, very funny. One would expect nothing less of an Emmy-Award winning writer-performer. As always, it is difficult to sum up an Izzard joke in a neat one-line quote, but suffice to say, it's hard for a book that has the phrase "soup porn" in it to be a drag. Where Believe Me hits its highest notes, however, is when Izzard leaves all armor behind and talks openly and vulnerably about the more tender parts of his life. His mother's passing, his coming out as transgender, his love and respect for his father and brother. He talks about these subjects without pretense or concealment, and in a way that will likely be a source of comfort to those currently dealing with these issues.

  If you are a fan of Eddie Izzard, then you will love this book. If you are not a fan of Eddie Izzard, then there is a good chance that this book will make you one. The experience is akin to him sitting down and having a chat with you, which, we can all agree, sounds delightful. His life is fascinating, his insights direct and unpretentious, and his sense of humor infallible. When it hits the shelves in a week or so you would be well advised to pick up a copy.

  Believe Me will be in stores June 13th and is published by Blue Rider Press

  RELATED ARTICLES

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/believe-me-by-eddie-izzard-1.3206694
  Word count: 263

  Believe Me by Eddie Izzard
  Browser review

  Rosita Sweetman

  Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00

  First published:
  Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00

  BUY NOW

  Book Title:
  Believe Me

  ISBN-13:
  9780718181727

  Author:
  Eddie Izzard

  Publisher:
  Michael Joseph

  Guideline Price:
  £20.00

  Victoria & Abdul: Eddie Izzard at Venice Film Festival this month. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/GettyEddie Izzard: I like to think I kicked the trans door open
  Eddie Izzard, the wildly funny, sexy stand-up, says here he’s shy and “lazy but driven”, and his shows – trans rather than drag – feature high heels, lipstick and nail varnish not as props but as “expressions of his sexuality”. A brilliant motormouth, he’s always talking but never saying anything, his producer, Sarah Townsend, told him. Minutes later he was crying: everything he’d ever done was an effort to retrieve his mum. Accounts of surviving boarding school – where he and his brother were sent, aged six and eight, after Mum’s death – of street performances; of going out in London for the first time in a dress, heels and make-up; of running 27 marathons in 27 days, to honour Nelson Mandela; and of doing his shows in French, German and Spanish, in honour of our Europeanness, are underpinned by a very English can-do attitude. An “action transgender”, 100 per cent male and 50 per cent female, he says that “despair is the fuel of terrorism”. And he’s “on a mission to unite the world”. Brava!

  Sat, Sep 23, 2017, 00:00

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