Printable Biography of Eddie Izzard

EDDIE IZZARD was born on 7th February 1962 to English parents in Aden, Yemen. His mother and father worked for BP (British Petroleum) at the refinery there, his father as an accountant and his mother as a nurse and midwife at the refinery hospital. The family moved to Bangor, near Belfast, in Northern Ireland for four years (the happiest part of his childhood) and then in 1967 to Skewen in South Wales. Sadly, the following year, his mother died of cancer. He was six years old. His parents, prior to his mum's passing, had decided that the best way for the family to survive, was for IZZARD and his older brother to go to boarding school.

At seven, now at school in Eastbourne, IZZARD saw a boy in a play getting a great reaction from the audience. It was there and then he (and his ego) decided that acting was his future. He auditioned for many roles, in many school plays and got cast in few. Aged 12, in a class show, IZZARD got his first laughs in a mimed sketch. Still he couldn't get into school plays. Then, at 15, he landed a role in Shakespeare's "COMEDY OF ERRORS," as 'the jailer.' Whilst it was a bit part, the plot demanded that he was handcuffed to the lead role. As a result, he got noticed by becoming a fast student in the art of upstaging. The teacher who directed the show (Andrew Boxer) gave him two more good roles and his career finally started.

In 1980, IZZARD began staging shows at Sheffield University, although he only lasted a year in his degree of 'Accounting and Financial Management with Mathematics.' Instead he began writing, producing and acting in comedy shows at the University, and in 1981 he took his first show to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He staged shows in Sheffield and Edinburgh again in 1982 and 83 (sleeping on people's floors because he was no longer at the University), but professionally he still couldn't get arrested. In 1984 he moved to London and did absolutely nothing, but watch television for a year. He couldn't work out how to go professional--how to get started. In the beginning of the next year, he came out as being a Transvestite.

IZZARD knew he was different from a very young age, but he didn't have a word for it at the time. He first remembers being interested in wearing a dress when he was four, but he also felt this predilection wasn't something to be told to the other kids. At 15 he was caught stealing make-up, but lied and said it was for a girlfriend in France. In 1985, aged 23, he came out for the first time. That went okay, but it took him until 1989 to tell his father, after worrying about his reaction. His dad was very relaxed about it, so IZZARD started talking about being TV on stage, two days later. In 1992 he performed his first gig in a dress. But this is not drag. He will wear a dress or trousers onstage, offstage or anywhere he wants to--just like women. It is his sexuality--not a costume.

"Transgender is a difficult area to explain and understand and even the actual members of the transgender community will come up with different definitions and interpretations. But," according to IZZARD, "these are the loose facts. There are straight, bi-sexual and gay transvestites (and transsexuals). They are probably of both sexes (thought female transvestites are kind of invisible in western society). The proportions of straight to bi to gay are difficult to work out but you may as well work with one third of each until more people in the transgender community come out."

'Coming out' for IZZARD, was a good and a difficult thing to do. IZZARD knew he didn't want to perform in a dress (at this stage) and at the end of 1985 he started street performing in London's Covent Garden (in trousers with no make-up) with a fellow mate from Sheffield. They started doing a comedy stunts double act (escaping from a woolly jumper etc), which wasn't very good. In 1986 they got better when they started a sword-fighting act. The next year saw IZZARD going solo, doing an escapology act whilst on a 5ft unicycle. The act itself was not really important (although it was insane enough to hold a street audience in bad weather), but it was the start of IZZARD developing the solo improvising and audience skills that would become the foundations of his stand up.

In 1988, IZZARD began performing stand up comedy in the London clubs (of which there are about 80). Two years later, all this experience in sketch comedy and street performing merged with his new stand up skills and things began to take off. In Christmas 1991 he did his final performances at the Comedy Store in London, after which he played larger and larger theatres around London. In February 1993 he took his stand up show into The Ambassadors theatre in the London's West End.

And IZZARD continues to evolve as an actor and comedian. In his native England, he has been called, "the greatest British stand-up comedian...of his generation," by Bryan Appleyard in the cover story of the London Sunday Times, while Darryl H. Miller noted in The Los Angeles Times in his review of "CIRCLE" at the Henry Fonda Theater: "He walks onstage to the roaring tumult usually reserved for rock stars and soon has the audience busting a gut about the Spanish Inquisition and chaos theory. Such is the phenomenon of Eddie Izzard, funniest man, in, well, pretty much all of the known universe."