Edward John "
Eddie"
Izzard (born 7 February 1962) is an
English stand-up comedian, actor and voice-over artist. His comedy style takes the form of rambling, whimsical
monologue and self-referential
pantomime.
Izzard's works include stand-up sets Unrepeatable, Definite Article, Glorious, Dress to Kill, Circle, Sexie and Stripped. He had a starring role in the television series The Riches as Wayne Malloy and has appeared in many motion pictures such as Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, Mystery Men, The Cat's Meow, Across the Universe, and Valkyrie.
He has cited his main comedy role model as Monty Python, and John Cleese once referred to him as the "Lost Python". He is also known for his transvestism.
In 2009 he completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief in spite of having no prior history of long distance running.
Early life
Izzard was born in
Aden,
Yemen, then the
Colony of Aden in the
Aden Protectorate. He was the youngest son of British parents Dorothy Ella, a midwife and nurse, and Harold John Izzard, an accountant who was working in Aden with
British Petroleum. A year after his birth, the family moved to
Bangor in Northern Ireland and lived there until he was five. The family then moved to
Skewen in South
Wales. Within a year, his mother fell ill and died of
cancer in March 1968. Izzard was six and his brother Mark was eight. Following his mother's death, Izzard attended St John's School in
Porthcawl,
St Bede's Preparatory School, and
Eastbourne College.
Early career
Izzard began to toy with comedy at the
University of Sheffield with partner and friend Rob Ballard. After leaving his accountancy degree course, they took their act to the streets, often in
Covent Garden. 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 moved his act into the stand-up comedy venues of Britain. After his first solo apperance at the
Edinburgh Festival in 1987, where he met then partner and actress Sarah Townsend, in the same year made his first appearance at
The Comedy Store, London. He refined his material throughout the 1980s and in the early 1990s, in part at his own club "Raging Bull" in
Soho, he finally began earning some measure of recognition through his edgy improvisation.
Success as a comedian
In 1991, Izzard got a spot on the
Fry and Laurie produced AIDS benefit
Hysteria 3, where he did his "Wolves" sketch, which broke him into the mainstream comedy circuit and television. His resultant stand-up work brought him
British Comedy Awards in 1993 (for
Live at the Ambassadors), a part in "Filth" which was a stand up presentation by left-wing sympathetic comedians in aid of raising money for the
Terence Higgins Trust in 1994, and 1996 (for
Definite Article).
In 1996, he got a part in his first United States-produced film, The Secret Agent, where he met and befriended Robin Williams. Williams already knew of Izzard's act, and discussed bringing his act to the United States. As a result, Izzard took Definite Article on a successful stint in New York City in the same year, and as a support act to Williams took Dress to Kill to San Francisco in 1998. His U.S. breakthrough came in 1999, when Dress to Kill was shown on the American television channel HBO, about a year or so after he performed the show on tour in the USA, UK and France. Suddenly, America was aware of Izzard, and the show went on to earn him two Emmy Awards in 2000 (for performance and writing).
In 1999, after complaints that his act recycled jokes appearing on his DVDs, the BBC's consumer programme Watchdog investigated Izzard's live act. Izzard explained that like most comedy performers, he used some of his most successful routines in each show. Nonetheless, Izzard was issued a warning by the Department of Trade and Industry. Since then, Izzard has rarely performed his stand-up act on television, saying that it uses up material at too high a rate, whereas stage material can be continually re-used in front of different audiences for several months.
In 2005, Izzard used his rambling style to provide the voice-over for the British government's television advertisements promoting recycling. The tagline of the ads was "Recycle. The possibilities are endless!" Izzard also performed on stage with Scottish musician Midge Ure at Live8 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He played the piano on the song "Vienna".
In January 2006, the U.S. television network FX announced the production of a new drama series called The Riches (formerly Low Life). Izzard and British actress Minnie Driver star as a married couple, Wayne and Dahlia Malloy, who have been part of a caravan of con-artist Irish travellers swindling their way across the U.S. with their children. After finding another family killed in a car accident, the Malloys assume their identities and start a new life as law-abiding suburbanites in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The youngest son has shown a preference for wearing girls' clothing, leading to some speculation that the role was based upon Izzard's experiences. Izzard has stated in several interviews that the character of Sam had been given transvestite tendencies long before he was cast as Wayne Malloy, but he has contributed his perspective to keep the character believable.
Theatrical, TV and film appearances
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.
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.
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.
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 . He said in 2009 that he would not be reprising his role as Reepicheep and the role was ultimately played by Simon Pegg in .
Izzard appeared in the 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.
In June 2010, Izzard is replacing actor James Spader in David Mamet's new play "RACE", on Broadway.
Izzard is scheduled to join Showtime's United States of Tara in 2011. He will play the role of a brilliant psychology professor skeptical about a disease.
Comic style
Izzard's style is heavily influenced by
Monty Python, especially in his use of a stream-of-consciousness delivery that jumps between topics as he free associates on stage. He does not generally work from a script, owing to his
dyslexia. Instead, he interrupts himself with new joke ideas, the characters he portrays turn into other characters, and he nonchalantly leaps from historical analysis to musings about household appliances. This often results in brief pauses in the routine which he fills with 'so, yeah', and other verbal tics that have become his trademarks. Thinking aloud is also part of Izzard's ongoing attempt to make the process of writing the show itself part of the humour. 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". He frequently notes the reaction to a joke midstream by pretending to write on his hand ("Should be funnier"; "Lost them there"; "They didn't believe me"; "They didn't follow, never do that again"), asks the audience questions, and verbally engages with hecklers.
Among Izzard's comic talents are mimicry and mime. He portrays God as an authority figure using the voice of James Mason and casts Sean Connery as Noah; these impersonations appear in many of his performances. Izzard also imitates activities such as sawing wood, vacuum cleaning, and mowing the lawn, anthropomorphising the machines with accents and personalities. Successful impressions, such as his Scottish clarinet teacher, Mrs. Badcrumble, become running gags which recur in different shows. He tackles topics both contemporary and historic, including frequent re-imaginings of historical events which result in scenes like 'Cake or Death: Church of England runs the Inquisition', or 'Jesus Ministers to the Dinosaurs'.
When asked about his comedy style by George Stroumboulopoulos, host of CBC Television's talk show, The Hour, Izzard described his use of history by saying,
"I just talk complete bullshit. The history, the politics, I noticed that no one was using history, so there's a lot of history lying about the place, and it's all free, and it's on Wikipedia! You know, I use Wikipedia like a crazy idiot, now. Then I take all this stuff, and I regurgitate it into a weird angle".
In 2008, in his Stripped tour, Izzard began using Wikipedia itself as part of his stand-up act, reading from a live copy of an article (via an iPhone) and mocking Wikipedia's self-referential editorial style.
Traditionally, Izzard has focused on the creative possibilities of thinking through absurd situations in real time. He also turns much of the attention on himself and his personality, including his cross-dressing ("It is my manifest destiny to wear a dress on all seven continents"). Contemporary pop culture (Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.) is also a frequent subject, brought up both to critique its weaknesses and to enhance his anecdotes.
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.
Transvestism
, October 17, 2003]]
In his show,
Dress to Kill, Izzard describes himself as an "executive", "action" and "professional"
transvestite, as "a male
tomboy" rather than a
drag queen or a "weirdo" transvestite (he cites
J. Edgar Hoover and
Hermann Göring as examples of the latter). He regularly
cross-dresses both on and off stage and makes it clear that cross-dressing is, for him, neither a part of his performance nor a sexual fetish. He remarks in his show
Unrepeatable, "Women wear what they want and so do I". According to Izzard, "Most transvestites fancy women". [Dress to Kill, 1999] He dismisses claims that he is a male
homosexual, saying he is "a
straight transvestite or a male
lesbian". He has also described himself as "a lesbian trapped in a man's body",
transgender, and "a complete boy plus half a girl".
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. In 1998, Izzard was named in a list of the biggest private financial donors to the Labour Party. 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, appeared again in a party political broadcast for the 2009 European election and again in a 2010 election video entitled 'Brilliant Britain'.
On 20 July 2006, he received an honorary doctorate in Letters from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sheffield, where he spent one year on an Accounting and Financial Management course in the early 80s. 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 Union of Students.
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, Izzard 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 Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans.
Marathons
On 27 July 2009, with only 5 weeks training and no significant prior history of running, 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 flags of England, Scotland or Wales depending on which country he was in, and carried a self-designed green flag bearing a white dove when in
Northern Ireland. The blog
Eddie Iz Running was a document of his
road running marathon, in which he ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He completed the run on 15 September 2009, after having run at least 27 miles each day, 6 days a week for 7 weeks straight, covering more than 1,100 miles across the UK. Izzard received a special award at
BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2009 for his achievements.
Izzard ran his final marathon in five hours and 30 seconds, narrowly outside his projected time. However, had he not stopped and waited 20 minutes for his film crew to catch up with him he could have finished well under his target time. In March 2010, Izzard took part in the Sport Relief Mile event.
Following the completion of the marathon runs, Izzard has started training to take part in an Ironman Triathlon, saying he has become fascinated with fitness "because there's no point in throwing away all that training".
Personal life
During his
Stripped tour, Izzard said he realised he was an atheist. "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."
He 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. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, Izzard was voted amongst the top 20 greatest comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. He was number 75 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.
During the 1999 television special It's... the Monty Python Story, which Izzard hosted, John Cleese said Izzard was the "Lost Python"; Izzard furthered that idea via his substitution for Graham Chapman in public performance of Python material with the rest of the original members of the troupe. He also made a cameo appearance in the Python reunion interview Monty Python Live At Aspen.
In 2008, Izzard received the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of UCD, Dublin, Ireland. In March 2010, the Students Union of the University of Sheffield overwhelmingly elected him their honorary President.
Discography and appearances
Stand-up
Live at the Ambassadors (15 November, 1993)
Unrepeatable (1994)
Definite Article (21 October, 1996)
Glorious (17 November, 1997)
Dress to Kill (9 November, 1998)
Circle (18 November, 2002)
Sexie (26 November, 2003)
Stripped (23 November, 2009)
Stage
900 Oneonta (1994)
The Cryptogram (1994)
Edward II (1995)
Lenny (1999)
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (2001–2002, 2003)
Trumbo (2003)
Filmography
The Oncoming Storm (1995) as Luthor Keeton
The Secret Agent (1996) as Vladimir
Velvet Goldmine (1998) as Jerry Devine
The Avengers (1998) as Bailey
Mystery Men (1999) as Tony P
The Criminal (1999) as Peter Hume
Circus (2000) as Troy
Shadow of the Vampire (2000) as Gustav von Wangenheim
The Cat's Meow (2001) as Charlie Chaplin
All the Queen's Men (2001) as Tony Parker
Revengers Tragedy (2002) as Lussurioso
Alien Invasion (2003) as Brik
Blueberry aka Renegade (2004) as Prosit
Five Children and It (2004) as It (voice)
Romance & Cigarettes (2004) as Gene Vincent
Ocean's Twelve (2004) as Roman Nagel
The Aristocrats (2005) as Himself
The Wild (2006) as Nigel (voice)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006) as Professor Bedlam
Ocean's Thirteen (2007) as Roman Nagel
Across the Universe (2007) as Mr. Kite
(2008) as Reepicheep (voice)
Igor (2008) as Dr. Schadenfreude (voice)
Valkyrie (2008) as Erich Fellgiebel
Rage (2009) as Tiny Diamonds
Every Day (2009) as Garrett
The Other Side (2009) as Dean Bellamy
(2009) as Himself
TV appearances
Barf Bites Back (Amnesty International Gala) (1991) - ITV
Open Fire (1994)
Have I Got News for You (1994, 1995 and 1996) - BBC Two
Aristophanes: The Gods are Laughing (1995)
Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1995)
Tales from the Crypt (1996) - HBO
Clive Anderson Talks Back (1996)
Inspector Derrick (1997)
Channel Izzard (1997)
Roseanne Barr Show (1998)
Rex the Runt (1998) - BBC
Shooting Stars (1998) - BBC
Parkinson (3 times)
Dennis Miller Live (1999) - HBO
Pythonland (1999) - BBC
Python Night (1999) - BBC
Good News Week (2000) - Network 10
Mongrel Nation (2002) - Discovery Channel
The Caroline Rhea Show (2002)
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (2002, 2004 and 2007)
The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (2009)
40 (2003) - Channel 4
Late Night with Conan O'Brien (2003, 2008) NBC
QI (Unaired pilot- 2002 or 2003, and 2010)
Top Gear (2004) - BBC Two
Last Call with Carson Daly (2005)
The Sharon Osbourne Show (2006)
Late Show with David Letterman (6 times)
Late Late show with Craig Kilborn (4 times)
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2006, 2008, 2009,2010)
The Henry Rollins Show (2006)
The Paul O'Grady Show (2009)
The Secret Policeman's Ball (2006)
Kitchen (2007) - five
Comedy Cuts (interview) (2007)
The Hour (2007)
Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (2007 and 2009)
The Daily Show (2000, 2003 and 2007)
The Riches (2007–2008)
The Secret Policeman's Ball (2008)
(2008)
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2009)
Kevin Pollak's Chat Show (2009)
''BBC Sports Personality of the Year (2009 award winner)
''The Day of the Triffids (2009)
Marathon Man (2010)
The Simpsons episode To Surveil with Love (2010)
Chelsea Lately (2010)
Video game
- Sgt. Tibbs the Cat (voice)
Future projects
Eddie Izzard said in a personal appearance (for his biopic
Believe) that he is currently putting together a script for a movie as a conclusion to The Riches. He said the plan is to "pick up exactly where we left off, and we think we're going to make a film of the next bit". As of May 24, 2010 there are no indications that this film will ever be made, leaving The Riches without a conclusion.
He has announced for future tours that a dollar out of each ticket sale will be appropriated to supplying Africa with contraceptives and other means of sexual protection.
See also
Cross-dressing in film and television
References
External links
Official web site
BBC America - Eddie Izzard
Interview with Izzard - The Observer, 3 October 2004
It's stupid and I love it - the Goon Show and me - The Guardian, 14 February 2005.
Izzard interviewed by Bono - The Independent, 16 May 2006
Venus Zine Staff Picks: Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill
Category:1962 births
Category:People from Aden
Category:Drama Desk Award winners
Category:English atheists
Category:English buskers
Category:English comedians
Category:English film actors
Category:English voice actors
Category:English television actors
Category:English stand-up comedians
Category:Cross-dressers
Category:Living people
Category:Old Eastbournians
Category:Emmy Award winners
