Eddie Izzard

Born: February 1962
Where: Aden, Yemen

The Covent Garden street performer, self-proclaimed transvestite and rising screen star chose comedy after a miserable childhood in South Wales.

Big screen roles have ranged from a slick fixer in the robbery caper Ocean's Thirteen to a rapier-wielding mouse in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The youngest son of a nurse and accountant, Izzard was born in the Middle East where his father worked for the oil company BP. A year after his birth, Izzard's family moved to the UK, where his mother died of cancer in March 1968. Izzard found solace in comedy, particularly the works Monty Python, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and the early Benny Hill.

After an education at Eastbourne College, he began to toy with stand-up at the University of Sheffield and, after being ingloriously kicked off his accountancy degree course, he took his act into the streets. Having spent a great deal of the 1980s working as a street performer in Europe and the United States, Izzard moved his act into the stand-up comedy venues of Britain, first appearing at The Comedy Store in London in 1987. He refined his material throughout the 80s, and in the early 90s he finally began earning some measure of recognition, though not in the guise in which he would later become famous. He made his 1994 screen debut in director Paul Greengrass's TV thriller Open Fire with Rupert Graves and went on to appear in the Damien Hirst short Hanging Around with Keith Allen. In 1996, he made his big screen debut in Christopher Hampton's The Secret Agent and his next big screen role was Jerry Devine in Velvet Goldmine in 1998. The same year he starred as the villainous Bailey in The Avengers and also appeared in Mystery Men, Circus and Shadow of the Vampire.

Izzard played Charlie Chaplin in Cat's Miaow and has also starred in All The Queen's Men and Alex Cox's Revengers Tragedy.

Recent work includes the role of a Prussian officer in the supernatural western Blueberry.