...and the emmy goes to...
OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A VARIETY, MUSIC OR COMEDY PROGRAM
AND
OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IN
A VARIETY OR MUSIC PROGRAM
From Variety
From Dorene and the izzard.com board gang appeared in
Variety magazine
|
52nd annual Emmy nomination for OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE
IN A VARIETY OR MUSIC PROGRAM OUTSTANDING VARIETY, MUSIC OR
COMEDY SPECIAL OUTSTANDING WRITING FOR A VARIETY, MUSIC OR COMEDY PROGRAM |
Guardian Unlimited's Net Notes (according to them I'm a "devoted fan"...heehee)
From the Daily News:
Even early on, it was subtly apparent that the new voting rules had changed the
tenor of the ceremony -- British transvestite comic Eddie Izzard won two Emmys for
"Dress to Kill," his brilliant HBO stand-up performance, beating such stalwarts
as Chris Rock, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Cher and Conan O'Brien. Izzard's special
was ruthlessly funny and uncommonly intelligent, and for the academy to acknowledge such
rarefied material is proof that someone really was paying attention.
From the Independent UK:
Lip glossing, cross dressing, fast talking...
...Story telling, free associating, wise cracking, straight acting, taboo breaking, America storming, Emmy winning Eddie Izzard
You know who the really important people are in a televised award show, when the camera pans to show nominees' faces in the audience moments before the winner of their category is announced.
They are the ones who are actually missing, because they are either too important or too busy to be there. Or because they know how ridiculous the whole event is and would rather be at home with the cat watching a different channel.
Eddie Izzard, our very own bloke-in-a-dress comedian, has now joined this extremely exclusive club. Just about everyone turned up at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night for the annual Emmy Awards – the Oscars of the American television industry. Whole casts from the planet's most watched shows were there. Jack Lemmon came along in case he won, which he did. Viewers glimpsed Michael J Fox (winner), Martin Sheen (not a winner) and even Cher, looking as cadaverous as ever.
Izzard, however, did not make it to the Shrine. He was in Vienna, busy filming an espionage comedy called All the Queen's Men. This was inconsiderate, even so. The director of the three-hour Emmy jamboree, with its 30 million or so viewers, can only have been hoping that Izzard would be squeezed out in all three of the categories for which he received nominations. That was not to be, however. Izzard won two Emmys, both for a recording of his show Dress to Kill, aired by HBO in the US last year. "Eddie Izzard can't be here tonight, so we will be accepting on his behalf," the presenters had to say.
His absence was everyone's loss, probably. In one category, "Individual Variety or Musical Performance", a fellow nominee was Cher herself. The Emmys, like the Oscars, are as much about the fashion of the night as it is about televisual art. Which designer has created the sexiest, most breast-revealing dress for which fabulous star? Now a beauty competition between Cher and Eddie Izzard, an unabashed transvestite on and off the stage, would have been something to relish.
His presence would have been apt for other reasons. This Emmy night was marginally less vacuous than its previous incarnations, if only because it also took time to celebrate social diversity. Will & Grace, an NBC sitcom about two gay men and their female neighbours, won a clutch of awards, while a fellow Briton, Vanessa Redgrave, was honoured for her role as a lesbian in another HBO show, If These Walls Could Talk 2. Izzard, who describes himself as a "male lesbian" and heterosexual, would have given the programme just a little more of that edge. Assuming he would have come in his heels.
How did this man come to be snatching awards from the likes of Cher before a global audience? It has been a fabulous ascent for someone who dropped out of studying accountancy at Sheffield University and, like so many other souls – this one included – traipsed up to the Edinburgh Fringe to see if he could be funny. His show was an unmitigated flop. And yet Izzard persevered, eventually gaining recognition with a Perrier Award nomination in 1991. Thereafter he won the British Comedy Award for best stand-up comedian in 1993 and 1996.
Since then, it has either been non-stop, sell-out touring – he has done three tours of the US in three years – or taking the slightly different route of dramatic roles, whether in Hollywood films, including the awful Avengers, or on the London stage. Most notably, last year he played Lenny Bruce, with whom he has often been compared, in Sir Peter Hall's production of Lenny at the National Theatre.
Most successful performers probably remember that one tiny moment when they realise for the very first time that they have it in them to entertain. I know when it happened to Eddie, because I was there.
He and I both had the privilege, or misfortune, of attending a slightly moth-eaten public school on the English south coast. It was in my last year there that I was cast as one of the twin menservants in The Comedy of Errors. It was a big part for me. Eddie, two years my junior, snared a tiny one. He was, as I remember it, Guard with Helmet. What I have no trouble recollecting, however, was that for all my efforts and all my lines, I never came close to inspiring the kind of hilarity in the audience that Eddie did.
Without any help from the director, Eddie hit on a brilliant comedic idea. He kept the visor of his helmet shut all through his 10 minutes on stage, opening it only when the moment came for his line. To achieve this, he had attached a line of cotton thread from the visor's top, over the helmet and down his back. He could flip it open with a quick yank with his hand to reveal a broad grin on his impish face. Parents and fellow pupils rolled about. By the last performance of the play, Eddie, with no regard for Shakespeare, was opening and shutting his visor at will. The other poor fellow on stage, playing Antipholus of Ephesus and trying to deliver a rather wordy soliloquy, could only see Eddie from behind and couldn't fathom what was going on.
Antipholus – actually Tim – is now a friend of mine. Recently he met Eddie as he emerged from a show in New York. They reminisced about his performance as Guard with Helmet. "That," Eddie confessed to him, "was the beginning. I said to myself: I can do this."
There is one other school episode worth reporting, which occurred shortly after that production of Comedy of Errors. Eddie was cast by a friend to appear as Mrs Caesar, a belly-dancer, in a student-devised review called Don't Get Your Toga in a Twist. (Schoolboy humour at its purest.) At the last moment, Eddie fell ill and couldn't go on. Eddie remembered this vividly too. "You see, I've known I was a transvestite since the age of four. But this was the first time I was going to be able to dress as a woman in public and have good reason for doing so. It was so close to my dreams, I got totally overwhelmed and I came down with a psychosomatic illness."
The age four thing is good to know. My school, I assume, cannot be held responsible for what is, after all, the unusual manner of living that Eddie has adopted. The dress and the make-up have surely become pivotal to his public persona, though being a transvestite actually has little to do with his comedy in his shows. He does, however, live it out in public, walking down the streets in PVC trousers and heels, with his lips rouged up. If he panicked in school before taking part in that review, somewhere later on he found considerable courage. A couple of years ago, he was beaten up – for "dressing like a girl" – in Cambridge. He sued his attackers and won. He did it for the principle, not the money.
What I would like to know, however, is how Eddie became so goddamned erudite? He and I mostly shared the same teachers at school and, well, whatever rubbed off on him did not on me. Anyone who has gone to an Izzard show or seen one of his videos will know that his routines are a spinning carousel of scientific and historical trivia. When he first came to the United States to tour, The New York Times rather brilliantly described him as a "human search engine". He does God, he does ancient times, he does the World Wars, he does contemporary politics... He also does languages. He has already taken his show to France – in fact to an old strip joint in Pigalle – last December, and has vowed to polish up his German sufficiently well to tour Germany soon.
Eddie, of course, is not relying on what he learnt at school or university. What assured him success in the United States was his willingness to syphon up as much new material as possible about this country. He might be De Tocqueville in a frock. "I'm crazy about research, about history, and finding out what people are thinking and arguing about and fighting about wherever I play," he told the Chicago Sun-Times this summer. "When I'm here, I'll sit up at night in a hotel with a TV remote and go through 100 or 200 channels. Admittedly, there really isn't anything on any of them. But when you keep flicking them and blend them all together, it's wild!"
It is thus that Eddie over here, as in Britain and Europe, knows exactly which targets are ripe for his rambling tongue. Like the National Rifle Association. Here in New York this summer, his best jokes were about the NRA and its refrain, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people". Eddie adds: "And monkeys kill people – if you arm them with them with AK-47s."
Americans don't mind this kind of prodding at their ludicrous side. (Dame Edna did it with relentless success on Broadway all last winter.) Well – possibly some Americans would rather Eddie Izzard never set foot, or high heel, in their state. But there are enough people on this side of the water who now adore him – as those two Emmys clearly prove.
From the Sunday Times UK:
EXPORTING EDDIE
Americans prefer the outrageous to have a British accent
The cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard, who famously dubbed himself "the TV who doesn't do TV" has become the latest in a long line-up of surreal British comedians to make it big "across the pond". Izzard, as notorious for his eccentric dress as he is for his stream-of-consciousness monologues, yesterday beat off American rivals to win two Emmy awards, for outstanding individual performance and for writing the comedy special Dress to Kill. The news will come as no surprise to his fans, including John Cleese, who once declared Izzard "the funniest man in Britain". Some might argue that Mr Cleese could lay greater claim to that title, especially after Monty Python's Flying Circus came top of the BFI's poll of the 100 best British TV programmes last week.
British comedians seem to have an uncanny knack for turning the banal into the ridiculous, exposing America's often conservative audiences to the taboos their own wise-cracking comedy stars generally don't tackle. Izzard's pet list of subjects includes cats "drilling for oil behind the sofa" and the infamous red sock which secretly infiltrates your white wash. And, if he runs out of ideas in his improvised shows, he reverts to the unlikely catchphrase "Aaanyway, fish."
Amazingly, American audiences cannot seem to get enough of this brand of humour. From Monty Python's rapturous reception at the Hollywood Bowl, through The Tracey Ullman Show, on to (a sanitised) Absolutely Fabulous and now Izzard, Britain's "special relationship" with America's funny bone is well established.
Even so, it is piquant for Izzard, who claims that his transvestism springs from the simple desire to achieve the "full clothing rights" enjoyed by women, to have pulled off the audacious conjuring trick of scooping up two Emmy awards despite never having actually "done" TV in a conventional sense. His winning performance was a filmed version of a live show performed at a San Francisco theatre.
Even those unmoved by jokes such as "if bees make honey, why don't earwigs make chutney?" cannot fail to admire the man's ingenuity. As he confesses, his success comes because of, not despite, sexual and artistic preferences which must make him "seem like a Martian" to most people. After this success, it may indeed take him a while to come back to earth. Aaanyway, fish.
From The Times UK:
Izzard's variety thrills Emmy judges
FROM GRACE BRADBERRY IN LOS ANGELES
EDDIE IZZARD, the transvestite comedian, proved that his brand of British humour does play in America when he scooped two Emmy variety awards.
His critically acclaimed one-man show Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill won over the voters of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, who recognised him for writing the show and for his performance.
The show was filmed for the American station HBO at the Stage Door Theatre in San Francisco two years ago. This year, Izzard's rambling reflections have played to packed houses in New York and Los Angeles.
Hollywood was deprived of the spectacle him tripping down the red carpet in a dress at the Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, for the "television Oscars"; he was in Europe filming All the Queen's Men with Matt LeBlanc, of the comedy Friends.
With Izzard out of the running, the talk of the red carpet was Geena Davis, who wore a see-through dress.
From TVNOW.com:
By now, you probably know that NBC's "The West Wing" stole the Emmy
Show last night by winning a record-setting nine awards. When something like that happens,
I often wonder if the voters got caught up in the day-to-day soap-like storylines of the
show and never put anything else on their VCRs. Even with the political hit's triumphant
blast, the night still had some major surprises. My favorite off-the-wall award went to
comedian Eddie Izzard and his HBO special "Dress to Kill". If you have never
seen the energetic fireball perform, think John Leguizamo with better eyes. His victory
proved that some voters got past the normalcy and found the cream of the crop. Now, if we
can just get them to pay some attention to Buffy.
From SF Chronicle (on the Emmy's
best moments):
Chris Rock's expression was classic when Eddie Izzard won his second Emmy (over
Rock), for performance in a variety, music, or comedy program: Shock. And - a tad cynical,
maybe? - "Wow."
From E!online:
Too bad Izzard's MIA. That means he's losing
out on the swank goody basket presenters and winners are taking home tonight. The fab find
is a $200 Longaberger of Ohio basket containing 40 pounds ($8,000 worth) of loot,
including a two-week loan and unlimited mileage of a new Cadillac; a weekend stay at
L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills; a Sharper Image Razor Roller Board Scooter; TiVo
personal digital recorder; Nokia World Wireless phone in matte aluminum; $500 worth of
M.A.C. cosmetics; custom Palm Pilot Vx model with the television academy logo; America
Online Internet service; Piper-Heidsieck champagne; American Express gift check for $50;
gift certificate for custom stationery from Creative Intelligence Inc. (they did the
invitations for Brad and Jennifer's wedding); reflexology and pedicure from Frédéric
Fekkai of Beverly Hills; a day of beauty from Amadeus Spa in Pasadena; Sports Club L.A.
gift certificate; Swarovski crystal body tattoos; Reebok exercise equipment; Skagen
sunglasses; Festina watch; Strida fold-up bicycle; Acqua di Parma's Colonia fragrance;
Nautica ties and fragrance; Philips clock/CD player/radio; a night at the Dry Creek
Vineyards in Napa Valley and a bottle of cabernet; David Orgell silver picture frame;
Dooney & Bourke leather CD case; Memory Mountain family tree Website; Harry &
David gourmet fruit; Zeffstyle scented candle; Toblerone chocolates; toiletries pack by
Fresh; and a $50 gift certificate from Fanci Full Gift Baskets.
From the LA Times:
Another fashion maven, Cher, looked stricken when she didn't win best
performance in a variety or music program, losing out to someone who looks even less like
a man than she does, British transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard.
From Reuters:
Eddie Izzard's triumph in the variety category also spoke to Emmy's new populist
face.
From Ananova.com:
Izzard scoops Emmys
Eddie Izzard is the toast of Hollywood after scooping two Emmy awards.
His one-man show Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill took voters of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences by storm.
He won Emmys for writing the show and for his performance, beating American heavyweights the Late Show With David Letterman and Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
His show was filmed for American channel HBO at the Stage Door Theatre in San Francisco in September 1998, and also played to sold-out houses in New York and Los Angeles.
From The London Telegraph:
EDDIE IZZARD believes he has the genetic make-up and physical structure of someone who is designed for "battling away at things", and I can see what he means. He has a rather square head set atop a welt of chunky shoulder, then his body tapers down to slim, girlish hips and small feet. If you tucked him under your arm, he would make an excellent battering ram; he is also the perfect shape to be fired from a cannon. As he weaves his way across a crowded film set, he walks at an angle - sloping forwards - as if ready to butt any misfortune that may come his way.
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Smiling through: comic genius Izzard |
Despite this pugnacious bearing, Izzard is not aggressive - anything but. A dedicated polyglot, he has learnt how to say "Hey, just be cool" in several languages, and will do anything to avoid a fight. On the streets, where he sometimes chooses to dress in high heels and lipstick, he needs a peaceable strategy to cope with unwanted or abusive attentions.
"Once you start talking," he says, "the danger level drops by 50 per cent. Unless I talk to people, I might seem like a Martian to them."
He greets me in a cordial, relaxed manner, although there is a hint of reserve - as if we had known each other for years but had never particularly bonded. We are in Austria, in a former army camp on the outskirts of Vienna, where Izzard is filming All the Queen's Men with co-stars Matt Le Blanc and James Cosmo. It is a Second World War action comedy, in which Izzard plays a bisexual transvestite - as opposed to the heterosexual transvestite he is in real life - ordered to steal an Enigma coding machine from a German factory.
As the employees there are all female, the principals spend much of the film disguised as women, in an attempt to infiltrate the workplace. Izzard, of course, is thrilled about this - frocks and army capers are two of his major obsessions - and he permits himself an affectionate chuckle at the discomfort of his colleagues.
"It's obviously an ordeal for them; they want to get their skirts off. They say, 'Look, my hem got caught in this tank, I'll have to take it off now.' And I'm like, 'Hey! Can I get this dress taken in a bit more?' " he says, cinching imaginary handfuls of material at his waist.
Today, however, his film costume consists of a macho, workaday khaki T-shirt, scratchy serge trousers, gaiters and bully boots. The only feminine touches are his long fingernails filed into perfect ovals and the fact that beneath his steel toecaps, his toenails are painted silver.
He has wanted to wear women's clothes since he was four, and began "coming out" as a transvestite in his early twenties. These days, his insistence on his "total clothing rights" - why, he asks, should girls get all the good stuff? - hardly seems extreme, particularly in the showbusiness world he frequents. Yet it has not been easy.
"I am constantly trying to access my whole girl side, trying to define what my sexuality is all about," he says. "I still haven't got the answers, it is still a bit confusing. And I know that some sections of society find me abhorrent."
Does he find that hurtful? "You learn to grow a thick skin."
He is open about the fact that he has sex with women, not men, and never tires of explaining that no, he is not and never has been homosexual. "I am not gay. I'd say if I was. But try as I might, I just can't get my hat off to fancying men," he says, airily.
He has considered having a sex change operation, but decided against it because he suspects - correctly, I fear - that instead of becoming a vision of feminine beauty, he would just look like a blocky little bloke who'd had a sex change. He likes to describe himself as a butch lesbian, and is therefore sexually attracted to female lesbians who are not, for obvious reasons, necessarily attracted to him.
What is in no doubt, however, is the fact that many women find him wildly desirable. He more than fulfills the criteria demanded in any dream date magazine poll - sensitive, nice bottom, sense of humour - and has the added, seductive ability to note when you've curled your eyelashes or bought a new lipstick. He talks in a soft, husky rumble that means you have to sit close to hear what he is saying, and I notice him noticing my newly cut hair in an interested way. In short, being with him is intoxicating.
We stroll past a platoon of buzzcut extras from No 9 Commando Unit and then pass by Le Blanc - who stars as Joey in the television series Friends - looking glossily handsome in his military uniform.
"Mmmm... Matt was a bit worried about me, about what I was going to be like," says Izzard. "But now he says I am his favourite transvestite."
It is difficult to capture in print the hilarity of much of what Izzard says; the unpredictable swoops of his conversation, his measured hesitation over certain words. In his trailer, we gossip about the notorious chocolate bar product placement at Anthea Turner's recent nuptials, and while I am mired in bitchy detail - Eddie, she was wearing her wedding dress while she ate it - he has flown off on another tangent altogether.
"The Spice Girls will be saying, 'Ooh, tacky'. The Bay City Rollers will say, 'Hey. We wouldn't go there,' " he says. I can hardly say how insanely funny I find this, but it also encapsulates the essence of Izzard's humour: the ability to be amusing without being cruel.
Edward Izzard was born in 1962 in Aden, where his father worked as an accountant for BP. The family moved to Wales and then to Sussex, where he attended a minor public school before going to Sheffield University to study accounting and financial management. After a year, he was kicked off the course - "I got zero in maths" - and went to try his luck at the Edinburgh Festival. He was a flop. In fact, years of flopping followed - as a street comedian, as a stand-up - but Eddie kept on pushing. In 1991, he was a Perrier award nominee and two years later, he won the British Comedy Award for stand-up.
"I need fear," he says. "I need fearful things to spur me on. If a goal is unwinnable, then it is also unlosable."
Despite his confrontational reputation today, he was frightened of telling his father he was a transvestite, and only plucked up the courage to do so when he was 29 years old. "Dad was very cool about it. He said he thought my mum would have been, too, which was very nice."
Izzard's mother died of cancer when he was six years old, and this is the fault line that runs right through his life; one that can still make him gently crack today. A needy child, he was forever calling out for lemonade and hot drinks in the middle of the night, treats that were always lovingly delivered by his mother.
"The loss doesn't get better. Time passes. The brain deals with it, but I don't think I'll ever get over it. It is hellish and there is no bloody logic in it," he says. "But people lost their entire families in concentration camps. Others have had a worse time than me."
Another thing he never tires of explaining is that his mother's death was not a factor in his transvestism - he can recall wanting to wear girls' clothes when he was four, but apparently he never wanted to wear her clothes. After her death, he cried intermittently for a year, then was emotionally frozen until he was 19. When he began having relationships with women, he didn't know how to cope.
"Being in love was like a drug, a heavy outpouring of emotion on my part. I opened up and they ran off. I had to learn to calm down. Now, I'm pretty good," he says, although he acknowledges that his mother's death has left him prone to destroying relationships. "I don't want to lose people, because I have experienced such loss before. And I don't want to open up because of the problems with my initial relationships."
Later that evening, we meet for dinner in the candlelit courtyard of his Conran-designed Viennese hotel. I had been intrigued by what he would choose to wear and now don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved by his scrubbed face, T-shirt and jeans. He wears drag - though he hates that expression - less and less these days, and quite often, he can't even be bothered to put on make-up. Just like a girl, in fact.
Ordering vegetable lasagne - he has been on a diet, he's trying to eat sensibly - and a glass of white wine, he looks tired. When he speaks, his voice ebbs and flows like a summer tide, as it has done all day; he is loud when talking about his sexuality or his career, quieter when we touch on difficult subjects such as his mother's death or his girlfriend.
By the time you read this, Izzard will know whether or not he has won any of the trio of Emmy awards for which he has been nominated this year, and unsurprisingly, he is keen to talk about them. The Emmys are important - the Oscars of the American television industry - and he has been shortlisted in three categories for his Dressed To Kill comedy special, a collection of video clips taken from his 1998 US tour.
I have a fairly good chance of winning at least one," he says, in a deceptively mild manner, for he is a man of vaunting ambition. It is hard to imagine another British comic who would dare to embark on such a carefully plotted strategy of world domination.
A surrealist transvestite might not be the obvious choice as one of Britain's most popular stand-up comics, yet Izzard is adored here not just for his wit but for his qualities of courage, tolerance and eccentricity - a trinity of virtues forever dear to the national heart. And the Americans seem to love him, too, although Izzard's routines may sound like particularly English whimsy - musings on flip-flops, soft fruit, skiing elephants and that perennial puzzler: if bees make honey, why don't earwigs make chutney? He contends, however, that comedy is human, not national, and claims to have proved it by performing in Paris (speaking in French). He now has plans to play in Berlin (in German) and is attempting to learn the language, anxious that his progress may be hampered by absorbing Viennese speech patterns.
"I need, I must have High German," he cries.
Yet he remains surprisingly inarticulate when it comes to the language of the heart. Back in London, Izzard has a house in Notting Hill that he shares with his mysterious girlfriend, whose identity he protects so assiduously that one can't help wondering if she exists at all.
He claims to be boring at home and difficult to live with, which I don't doubt for a moment. Although blessed with many good qualities, his overriding characteristic is what he describes as his "emotional compression". This makes him seem oddly derelict, even when having the jolliest conversation. When I ask him if he misses his girlfriend and is missed in return, he grimaces as if I were pulling out one of his perfect silver toenails. "Yes," he says finally. "But home is not a place. Home is in my head."
And when he does go home, he never unpacks his suitcases. That is just about all we need to know.
