Eddie Izzard - Sexie

Eddie Izzard is one of Britain's most successful comedians. His sell-out tours play to legions of loyal fans across the world; his unique stream-of-consciousness routines have pushed back the boundaries of comedy. But, he is still haunted by the thought that it might all disappear

Eddie Izzard's dressing-room looks like a gang of Miss World contestants have been on a bender. Half-empty glasses of white wine, stained with lipstick, litter the surfaces.

He is wearing a pair of La Perla briefs in black lace and long false eyelashes, which curl over green and turquoise glittered lids towards heavily plucked brows. He is struggling to get one foot into a pair of Wolford tights, which throws him forward tipping his bottom into the air. He manages to be both burlesque and sensual.

Rebecca, Izzard's personal trainer cum wardrobe assistant and a key member of the Sexie tour, hovers nearby while Izzard climbs into his skirt. He plucks self-consciously at the over-stretched fabric hanging around his narrow hips. "Pin it tighter, tighter," he urges Rachel, his make-up artist. He spins and twirls in front of the mirror.

"Is this too short now? Will my thighs look big to the audience? Do my tights show through?"

In the background, a DVD playing on a state-of-the-art computer drones on about the rise and fall of the Roman empire. On the edge of the counter there are two vast, flesh-coloured blancmanges.

"My new breasts," Eddie says, looking at the mounds wobbling, nipple side down. "I've decided to go up to 38D."

The breasts and an elaborate military style frock coat that will cover them are a new development in Izzard's image, although his attitude to his sexuality remains the same.

"I'm just a bloke in a dress," he said when he came out as a heterosexual transvestite in 1991, at the moment his career began to take off. Now, he is just as likely to be seen dressed as a man or as a woman. It goes in phases, apparently.

Karon Maskill, his PR, says he was in "a blokey phase" at the beginning of this year so now perhaps he is making up for lost time. It hardly makes a difference to the female fans.

"Women seem to like a boy in a skirt," he says in his laconic drawl. "I am very, very happy about that."

He pauses, sucking in his stomach and looking at his reflection for the last time. "Christ, I am pleased as hell."

The show is about to start. It is the first night and the theatre is packed. There are no tickets left for the five-night run, which is pretty much how it has been all over America, Australia and New Zealand since Sexie started touring at the beginning of July.

They have sold more than 450,000 tickets in all. The British tour, is a sell-out.) Izzard is on his way to fulfilling his dream of world domination. Americans cannot get enough of his surreal streams of consciousness ("Eddie Izzard!" the bellboy in my hotel screeched, "is he here again? He's awesome!").

His first world tour, Definite Article, was in 1996, during which he played New York, where success was not immediately apparent. Determined to conquer it, he returned to the city the following year with Glorious. But it was not until 1998, when he took Dress to Kill all over the US (it did not play in Britain) that his career stateside really kicked off.

Robin Williams picked up the show in New York and offered to produce it in LA. Madonna, Gabriel Bryne and Carrie Fisher were in the front row. Izzard finally hit gold with the video, screened by the television channel HBO across America, and which earned him two Emmys.

As a result of all this travelling, Izzard has built up a loyal, if small, entourage. They are a surrogate family, who eat and drink together every night. "I think it was difficult for him at the beginning," says Mick Perrin, his tour manager who has been with him since Definite Article.

"He didn't know who he could trust. But through time, he's worked it out. He is very easy to work for, although he has very high standards."

"It is very important to me that if the man who is in charge of the lights thinks my skirt doesn't work, he can say so," Izzard says. "I want everybody to be able to say whatever they want. We all work long days, and we have to be the best."

While the technical crew for the Sexie tour is American (the same team he used for his last), the tour manager, the make-up artist and the PR are English. Rebecca, the personal trainer, was Izzard's trainer in New York when he lived there at the beginning of the year.

When he asked her to accompany him on tour (at some cost, one imagines), she gave up her job at a health club and agreed to take only one week out for her wedding. Izzard clearly inspires loyalty.

"He is very generous," Mick Perrin says. (The crew all stay in the same fancy hotels, although Izzard does upgrade himself to a suite and he does fly first class.) "There are two lines that will do me on my spirituality," Izzard says. "Do unto others as you would have done unto you, and what goes around comes around. Those two get you a long way."

When Izzard walks on stage, it is with a kind of sailor's roll. The crowd - very mixed, from the silver-haired to young goths - erupts in rapturous applause. In other cities, Izzard has, apparently, been receiving five-minute standing ovations before opening his mouth, although he does not like easy applause ("Don't laugh! Don't laugh!" he pleads with the Boston audience within minutes of beginning. "You don't know what I'm going to say yet.")

It is virtually impossible to describe Izzard's comedy on paper. He does not do "routines" nor does he attack the audience. He does the opposite. His comedy is childlike and acutely observational. He maintains he is not naturally talented at anything.

The only gift he admits he might possess is the propensity for hard work, for making himself funny by working at it. This is a paradox since his shows appear to be anything but scripted (they're not) or hard work.

"When we did some warm-up dates before this tour," Mick Perrin attests, "he just had a few sentences written on a scrappy piece of paper. We were all a bit worried. I thought, "My God, he's given this tour absolutely no thought at all."

He went out there and the first half of the act was dreadful. By the second half, though, he was plucking stuff from nowhere and was already on his way to finding the material that forms the backbone of the show."

At which point Izzard mimes the poor woman wrestling with a head of snakes and trying to avoid looking in the mirror so she is not turned to stone. Apart from a few jokes about 90 per cent of Americans not possessing passports - are you the 10 per cent?" he asks hopefully. "I do hope you are" - and the incompetence of the CIA post 9/11, there is no concession to a transatlantic audience.

At the end, he gets the now customary standing ovation. "Every show is a workshop," Izzard explains back in the rabbit-hutch dressing-room.

"Just one big conversation where I try things out. I used to just roll an old show into the beginning of the new one, but that got too well known so I have to work out a new way of doing it. At the moment, I just go on and talk crap until it gets going."

You could watch Izzard's show five nights in a row. No two were the same and the fifth was wildly different from the first.)

Izzard's influences, much like his act, are rambling and eclectic. He watches endless DVDs on worthy subjects, from wars to religion to the Greek myths (all of which end up in the show) and he channel-surfs relentlessly.

Books? He thinks. "I've got a few with me at the moment. The Koran, a book about transvestism, a biography of Steve McQueen and a book on comparative religion."

Light reading, then. Now that the pressure is off, Izzard switches the Roman empire DVD to a Stones CD. The atmosphere starts to feel a bit more rock'n'roll (it's all relative).

Rachel cleans his torso with baby wipes while Izzard swigs sauvignon and throws salted nuts into his mouth. Mick Perrin is outside working out what to do with the fans amassing at the stage door. Cleaned up, Izzard changes into a minuscule denim skirt, puts on a black La Perla bra to match his knickers (Rachel helps him in with the breasts), a tight black shirt and a pair of black stilettoes. Face make-up stays on.

It is a wet, miserable night and the fans are brought into the corridor out of the rain. The Rocky Horror contingent is out in force. It's rather alarming, seeing them en masse in their black leather and weird make-up. The line-up is mostly female and not at all representative of the audience.

"You've changed my life!!" many of them say, rather poignantly. "I think you're sooooo wonderful."

Izzard stands halfway down, signing photographs and thongs bearing his name, and posing for pictures on single-use cameras. (The following night I am relieved to find a pastor and 26 members of his church waiting patiently in line.)

"He does get stalkers," Perrin says. "One woman followed him across America and turned up backstage at every show wanting an autograph, every night. In the end Eddie refused and told her, "You have to stop this. I want you to get a life."

"Do you enjoy all this, I ask Izzard when the last fan disappears, elated. It is nearly 1am. He turns and looks at me. "Of course I do. It's fucking fantastic."

Since Eddie Izzard came out as a transvestite in 1991, much has been made of his childhood, particularly his mother, Dorothy Ella, who died after a long battle against cancer when Izzard was six. Before her death, she made Eddie a little black costume, with poppers and a beak, so he could play a raven in the school play.

He says he can't remember what she looks like now, but that he constantly returns to the memories he amassed in the short time he knew her. He recalls the day she died with clarity.

"My brother and I were taken to this neighbour's house where we'd never been before. We just sat there eating all this party food - cakes and sandwiches - looking at all these adults we didn't know and not knowing what was going on. And then my dad finally arrived, and collected us and took us home and told us."

His sentence peters out. Izzard is open about how he has never got over it. "She is always with me. Always. There can be no explanation. If there is a God, then what the fuck is that all about? Why take my mother?"

"They were very, very close," says his father, Harold (also known as John), who remarried seven years later. "Eddie was a very loving child, but not easy."

There have been continual attempts to link Izzard's eventual transvestism with his mother's death, but this is plainly absurd.

"I completely associate the desire to get up on stage and win the audience's applause to come from the loss of her affection," Izzard admits, "but not the transvestism, that's in the genes."

Izzard was born in Yemen in 1962, where his father worked for BP. When he was one, the family returned to Bexhill, then moved to Northern Ireland for four years, and South Wales for two years, where his mother died, and then back to Bexhill from where the two boys went to boarding school (Izzard's brother prefers to remain out of the limelight).

By Izzard's own admission, he was an ambitious child, constantly searching for approval, hell-bent on showing his peers he was worthy of their friendship. As if to prove the point, he says one of the greatest experiences of his life was sitting in school assembly and being picked, in front of his peers, to play in the school's first division football team. He had to be good at everything.

"It's not about squashing people down to get to the top. It's about proving to myself. I don't like myself in my natural state. I have a fear of not creating anything good, so I'll work and work and work."

He admits now that he is still bothered if people don't seem to like him, but says, "I'm sure a lot of people must not like me, especially extremists."

Because of the obvious emotional legacy of his mother's death, the influence his father has had on his life is usually overlooked. In fact, dress and lipstick aside, father and son are remarkably alike.

Eddie grew up watching Harold rise from the position of BP filing clerk to chief auditor. His grandfather, Charlie, was a van driver and his grandmother, Lou, a cleaner, who set up a local community project which Harold Izzard now runs.

"The Izzards are not great hobbyists. Working hard is an occupational hazard," Harold Izzard explains. "I came from a very working-class family. You move yourself into a position through hard work. I certainly had the feeling that if anybody was going to do anything for my parents, it had to be me.

"If I was a failure, then that would be regarded as their failure. That comes into a lot of working-class ethics and I think I passed it on to my boys."

Entirely unaware of what his father had said about living up to his parents, Eddie will later admit quietly, "You know, my father has the same name as me. It's not like I'm called Brown. I don't want him to be associated with anything negative if it goes wrong for me."

"I've never heard him say that before," Harold says when I tell him. Given Harold Izzard's working-class background, one assumes it must have been a stretch comprehending the idea of his son in a dress.

Izzard told him after watching Crystal Palace lose. "He was cool about it," Eddie says simply. (Harold Izzard has been quoted in the past as saying, "I can't say I was best pleased, but then what was there to be displeased about? He is my son and I love him. This is who he is.")

When I ask Eddie if it would be so very bad if his career took a nosedive, that surely there would be other things in his life that would sustain him, he says simply, "I'd blow my head off. It's all or nothing."

There is, in all truth, nothing else in his life that matters as much. Izzard began a degree in maths and financial accounting at Sheffield University. He dropped out after a year to become a street performer, which he did for 10 years, interspersed with the odd stand-up gig.

Poor, and angry that nobody seemed to think he was any good, Izzard decided to set up his own avant-garde comedy club, Raging Bull, first at the Boulevard Theatre and then at the Shaw Theatre on Euston Road, London. It was a financial disaster (he lost £10,000), although it eventually got him noticed.

This is pure Izzard logic. If nobody will help you, you help yourself. In 1991, at the Edinburgh Festival, he was nominated for the Perrier Award and the same year Time Out gave him an award for "a distinctive contribution to comedy". It was slowly starting to happen.

"It was a risk coming out as a transvestite then," Izzard says, "it could have gone either way and ruined my career. I still think it was a very brave thing to have done and I like myself for that bravery."

By 1993, he had his own show at the Ambassadors. Tours, videos and more London shows followed, and all the while he refused to take the easy route to fame by going on television, for fear of being packaged and over-exposed.

"People thought it was because I didn't like telly," he remembers. "But if you do telly, you're beholden to it. The power of it is what people crave. I say to comics now, "Go to America. Do chat shows. But don't do telly."

Despite his eventual meteoric ascent, Izzard is far from satisfied. He is obsessed with pushing back boundaries, just as he did with Raging Bull. He has already performed in French - "probably the most frightening thing I've ever done professionally" - and is now learning German.

Ultimately, he says he would like to "be in really good films and perform comedy in French, German, Arabic, Spanish, Russian and Polish". He is not joking.

The plotting, the manoeuvring and the tactical plans continue. "He is just not in a place he wants to be," his father explains, "he wants to be a serious actor and he'll work until he is considered one."

"It's not an 'add-on'," Izzard stresses. "I always wanted to act."

Since finding a dramatic agent 10 years ago, Izzard has been in a series of small films, usually with good casts but receiving little attention. Velvet Goldmine is perhaps the best known to date.

Recently, he has played the leads in two very successful plays, Lenny, based on the life of the American Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce, and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, a revival of Peter Nichols's dark comedy about a couple with a handicapped daughter and the strain it puts on their marriage.

Joe Egg transferred from the Comedy Theatre to Broadway at the beginning of this year with Izzard playing Brian, a droll, bored schoolteacher whose grief over his daughter cannot be translated into words.

"Izzard's disarming lightness of touch and swiftness of mind make him just the right messenger for Nichols's sulphurous irony," John Lahr wrote in the New Yorker.

The part won Izzard a prestigious Tony nomination for best actor and the Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding actor in a play. Joe Egg was, Izzard says, together with the Channel 4 drama 40, in which he played the coked-up, burnt out, testosterone-filled Ralfie (to mixed reviews - "miscast", said many of them), the most fulfilling thing he has done to date:

"You have to keep on moving," he says. "Most of the time I spend concentrating on keeping ahead of the game. You have to be obsessed. You have to be tactical. It took so long for me to get things going, I will not go back there.

"It could all just disappear, and I will not have anybody else paying my bills, I will not, so I have to concentrate on building, protecting, staying one step ahead. Whether it's right or wrong, I constantly feel I'm playing catch-up. Christ, the number of 23-year-olds who are on their 15th film. I've been ready since I was seven!"

Izzard's present mission is not a breeze. A transvestite in Hollywood? He keeps a flat in LA (as well as a house in London) and while he is wise enough not to show up to auditions wearing make-up - "they just think I'm gay or something" - and is more than happy to dress as a man, his growing reputation as a comic in the US - when he often goes 'girl' - must shape his profile.

Be honest, I say to him. Given you want to be considered mainstream there must have been times when you have wished you weren't a transvestite. He shakes his head.

"It's like the colour of my eyes. I do sometimes find myself wearing it as a badge of honour - like, "Look how brave I am! I've climbed the Matterhorn!" - but after every audition I analyse, 'Did I not get that part because I'm a transvestite or was it because of my acting?' I try to be very honest with myself."

I ask him if he has considered the idea that he might never be as good an actor as he is a comic. "I will never let myself believe that," he says, "otherwise I might as well give up now."

When we have this conversation, Izzard is running on a treadmill. It is an apt metaphor. I have spent an hour watching his personal trainer stretch his square body this way and that in pursuit of a shape that might, inevitably, be unobtainable.

"He wants to look long and thin, like a woman," Rebecca explains. At one point, when Izzard is doing something deeply painful-looking with his legs, he cries out, "This is like stretching wood."

He watches his diet like a Hollywood starlet ("No croutons or dressing please," he instructs the waiter when we lunch one day) and now he is on the running machine, sweating profusely.

He'll stay on it for an hour and a half. "It burns the fat off. I'm not one of these people who can eat a pig and still be slim."

Izzard's face is scrubbed of make-up and he is wearing a man's running vest and shorts. His white sports socks are pulled up over his shins and his small feet are encased in box-fresh trainers. He is a quite different prospect from the charismatic half-naked man I met on the first night of the tour.

In the past, other interviewers have concluded that Izzard is "emotionally derelict" and that he uses his transvestism "as a way of putting himself beyond humiliation and shame".

I don't think he is emotionally derelict, just very, very frightened of finding himself out of control. "If I do seem like I manipulate, it is only because I don't want to be manipulated myself," he explains.

There is a woman in his life but it is a complicated relationship, shaped, one imagines, by his unconventional, itinerant lifestyle and his drive - and I would guess, hers.

Izzard admits she will not be named for fear of being judged in his shadow. "I could never be with anybody who didn't share the same big vision as me," he says.

"But if you rely on somebody else getting you out of the door every morning, then you risk them not being there one day and then suddenly you can't get out of the door on your own. I will never go back to that scared shell I was in before."

But is that not what love is, I say to him, about trusting someone to always be there?

"I loved my mother," he snaps back, "And she disappeared - against my will, against her will. If people help you and you help them back, then that's great. But when the shit hits the fan, you have to be able to sort it out by yourself."

Eddie Izzard's first proper girlfriend (he did not lose his virginity until he was 21) once told him that she only found him exciting on stage. The rest of the time, she said, he was rather boring. There is no doubt there is a difference - Izzard is much quieter, more serious and emotionally reserved - but fundamentally he is the same.

Because he has inherited Harold Izzard's love of military history - "I love things that have made big changes" - and our stay in Boston is coming to an end, Izzard decides he wants to take us all sightseeing.

We pile into a van that comes with a guide called John, and travel towards Lexington and Concorde, two sites marking the first effective armed resistance to British rule in America, following a battle in 1775.

John, it turns out, has a feeble grasp of the history. Eventually we arrive at the Buckman Tavern, which housed the colonials during the fight. A well-meaning middle-aged couple dressed in bonnets and smocks appear in the doorway, and proceed to take us round the house/museum at a snail's pace.

They explain items such as wafflemakers and brooms in painstaking detail, but look befuddled when asked intelligent questions. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Izzard hopping about from one foot to the other, eager to move to another room and ultimately out of the door.

After an hour we emerge. Izzard wants to see a historical documentary scheduled for 4.30pm at a nearby visitor's centre. John has 15 minutes to get us there, but unsure of the way, he crawls along at 25mph. Izzard peers at his map, then the speedometer, then the clock.

Suddenly, unable to contain his impatience any longer, Izzard whoops "Floor it, John!" at which point our hapless guide guns the accelerator and we shoot off. Izzard says of himself that he, too, is "built to be attacked".

It seems fitting for a man motivated by high self-demand and great fear that he enjoys spending a day looking at battle plans and commemorative plaques to soldiers (he loves discussing Churchill and Napoleon). Izzard had also wanted to get to a cemetery, but there wasn't time.

I ask him what he would like to see on his gravestone, given he wants to achieve so much. He thinks and says, finally, "This guy was a Jamaican."

Past Izzard Features Include:

Dress to Kill and Joe Egg