EDDIE IZZARD
from Transgender Zone
What happened to Eddie since our original article?
Comedians were the new cool. Then Ben Elton collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber while Paul Merton flogged mobile phones on television and the new breed suddenly looked about as funky as Jimmy Tarbuck playing pro-celebrity golf. And then there is Eddie Izzard. As other once-radical comedians joked all the way to the bank via the inanity of light entertainment and advertising, Izzard just grew hipper. For when away from the stand-up arena, he is not sitting on the chat-show sofa but quietly crafting a career as a serious actor.
“I feel if I lose
all that money by not doing that stuff — and adverts pay crazy money — then
it forces me to work harder creatively. It’s taken me so long to get here, what
is the point? I say ‘no’ a lot.”
“I still have to prove myself in a dramatic role before I am offered many things.
” His forthcoming stage role is hardly a thigh-slapper: he plays the father of a mentally handicapped boy in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg at the Comedy Theatre.
For such roles,
being known as a comedian is not helpful. “Yes, which is why I am building my
acting career slowly. When I first became known in stand-up, it was in a culty
way.” He may be modest but he is also a man powered by ambition. Izzard still
simmers about how at public school he was never cast in the play. “I have since
tried to work out whether I was just crap,” he says with an intense smile.
His manner is more masculine still. If you suspected he might make John Inman
look butch there is no trace of campness. He has a girlfriend, which I guess
qualifies him as straight — or, as he would have it, “straight lesbian”, since
his fantasy is to be a woman making love to another woman. “I’m in a blokey
phase, but I still want to give myself room for manoeuvre. Directors have said
to me: ‘Yes, your stuff’s great, but I’m not going to use you’. They think,
‘Oh, he’s a transvestite, what am I going to do with that?’” Ah, the T-word
already. I feared raising this might be tricky; instead, it’s hard to get Izzard
off the subject. Being the second transvestite to become famous (he says he
was preceded by a well-known cross-dresser in New Zealand) lent him a unique
laughter point when he started. Now it is a distraction.
“It is going to stick around until more generations of transgender people come
out,” he says. Being gay may have cachet in certain circles — theatre — but
society still gets its knickers in a twist about cross-dressers. “There is a
perception that certain uplifting things go with being gay, but transgender
is still (in) a difficult phase. Yet it is way better being where I am now and
not having to lie.” Aged four, Izzard suspected that he was not entirely like
other boys, and at 15 was caught shoplifting lipstick. He dismisses armchair
analysis that this could have been sparked by the early death of his mother
and a brutal teacher who helped him through his grief with regular beatings.
His urges drove him to despair. “I am really quite shy, and I had very low sexual
self-esteem. I went through a greasy-haired, spotty phase.” He only gathered
courage to come out in his early twenties, when he discovered a transvestite
help desk virtually next door to where he lived. “I thought it must be karmic,”
he says, “but it was probably just Islington. “I also thought: ‘That’s it, no
woman will want me’, and I was celibate for three years.”
So is Izzard Jr happy? “Yes, since then I’ve been very content. I have a slightly compressed emotional state; I never get delirious because it might all end tomorrow, but I’ve never got really depressed since, either.”
Having made peace
with himself, he could devote himself to work, which he has done without a break
for 14 years. If he is frustrated that “closed-minded studio heads” won’t cast
him as a romantic lead, the intriguing thing is that women seem to find him
highly attractive. Just as fame opens doors it lowers drawers (look at Chris
Evans’s incredible romantic back catalogue). But Izzard’s vast female fan club
is proof that women’s fantasies are more extensive than the square-jawed bozos
offered them by Hollywood.
He is inspired by the example of Sir Ian McKellen, who as an actor is very good
and as a man is very gay, and openly so. “We need more to come out as transvestites
and people would think, ‘Oh, that seems all right’. At the moment it is like
it was for gay men in the 1950s: ‘So what is your career, having sex with men?’
‘Er, no, I’m a banker, actually.’ “It is a little bit straitjackety, sometimes
I feel in a girlie mood!"
Unlike most forms of sexuality, being a transvestite seems sadly solitary: it
is not about looking sexy to others but becoming one’s own sexual fantasy figure.
Isn’t that narcissistic? “It is not about ego but it is about fancying yourself.”
But then he adds, a little later: “I certainly don’t fancy myself.”
So doesn’t transvestitism lead to inevitable disappointment: the most handsome
man will never look like the most beautiful woman, no matter how skilfully he
applies the lippy.
“Absolutely. But isn’t it in everyone’s lives? Don’t lots of men want to end
up looking like Steve McQueen?” Perhaps, but their looks are hardly an obsession:
they can barely be bothered to look in the mirror. Transvestites, I would hazard,
don’t have that luxury of indifference. And with such difficulties, work must
seem an attractive escape.
Anyway, that’s enough complicated desires. I mention Europe and he burbles away
with even greater animation. A rampant federalist, he is Bill Cash in reverse,
though more engaging. Has he, a Labour donor, been disappointed at the party’s
meandering journey towards the euro? “Well yes, I would like us to be in there
taking part. What are we going to be doing in 50 years? Europe will have become
a great superpower and there we will be on the sidelines: ‘No, we can’t be a
part of it, we won the war.’ Er, did we?” His complaint about national currencies
is delightfully idiosyncratic: “In Sweden I bought caviar and got confused about
the money and ended up paying 10 times more than I thought. Or a Greek taxi
driver tells you, ‘That will be 60m drachmas, please’, and you haven’t a clue
if that’s right.”
More loyal to Tony Blair on Afghanistan, he credits him with steering America
away from “carpet-bombing the world”, and still, perhaps naively, thinks the
prime minister will persuade President George W Bush not to walk away from the
country once the terrorists have been smoked out of their caves.
He was also inspired by Blair’s conference call to save the world before lights-out.
“If we don’t do anything about Aids in Africa, in 150 years’ time they will
look back on us like monsters. It will be like the potato famine all over again.”
Yet Izzard’s views are essentially new Labour. Unlike the (old) Ben Elton, he
celebrates the growth of the middle classes and the greater cohesion they have
given society. “I am a great realist,” he says.
Does he think about going into politics? “Yes, I do,” he replies instantly.
“I would have to give up this first,” he says, meaning showbiz, but he has already
shown himself to be highly versatile.
“I would be more interested in representing Britain in Europe than in domestic
politics.” He realises he would have to “work my way up”. As Glenda Jackson
discovered, there is a tendency when faced with celebs-turned-politicos “to
say, ‘Oi, you’ve won an Oscar, so shut up and sit over there’ ”.
Despite his Europeanism and burgeoning success in America, Izzard remains deeply
British. The sex stuff is merely a minor part of it. He is keeping alive a great
tradition: the British iconoclast who does it very much his own way. And you
can’t get cooler than that.