EDDIE IZZARD, born on this date (also known as Suzy Izzard), is a British stand-up comedian, actor and activist. Her comedic style takes the form of what appears to the audience as rambling whimsical monologues and self-referential pantomime.
Izzard’s stand-up comedy tours have included Live at the Ambassadors, Definite Article, Glorious, Dress to Kill, Circle, Stripped, Force Majeure and Wunderbar.
She starred in the television series The Riches and has appeared in numerous films, including Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, Valkyrie, Absolutely Anything, and Six Minutes to Midnight. Izzard has also worked as a voice actor on films such as Five Children and It, The Wild, The Lego Batman Movie, and the Netflix original series Green Eggs and Ham. He is featured in the Netflix documentary, Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution.
Among various accolades, she won two Primetime Emmys for Dress to Kill and was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
In 2009, Izzard completed 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief, despite having no history of long-distance running. In 2016, she ran 27 marathons in 27 days in South Africa in honour of Nelson Mandela, raising £1.35 million. In addition to her native English, she regularly performs stand-up in Arabic, French, German, Russian and Spanish, and is an active supporter of Europeanism and the European Union.
A dedicated Labour Party activist, Izzard twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s National Executive Committee and then joined as the most successful initially non-elected person after Christine Shawcroft resigned in March 2018. In 2022, Izzard attempted to become the party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Sheffield Central but was not selected in the members’ ballot. In 2023, Izzard attempted to become the party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Brighton Pavilion but was not selected in the members’ ballot.
Izzard identifies as genderfluid and calls herself “somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish”. She uses the word “transgender” as an umbrella term. When asked in 2019 what pronouns she preferred, Izzard responded, “either ‘he’ or ‘she'” and explained, “If I am in boy mode, then ‘he’, or girl mode, ‘she'”. In 2020, she requested she/her pronouns for an appearance on the TV show Portrait Artist of the Year and said she wants “to be based in girl mode from now on”. In March 2023, she announced that she would begin using the name Suzy in addition to Eddie, saying that she is “going to be Suzy Eddie Izzard”. Explaining that she had wanted to use the name Suzy since she was 10 years old, she added that people “can choose” which name they want to use to refer to her, and that she would keep using Eddie Izzard as her public name since it is more widely recognised.
In the past, Izzard identified as a transvestite and has also called herself “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body” and “a complete boy plus half girl”. According to her memoir Believe Me, she first cross-dressed in public at the age of 23 with the help of a lesbian friend, an experience which ended in a verbal confrontation with three 13-year-old girls who had followed Izzard home from a public toilet.
She started to publicly identify as transvestite in venues such as the Edinburgh Festival as early as 1992. She states that the way she dresses is neither part of her performance, nor a sexual fetish: “I don’t call it drag; I don’t even call it cross-dressing. It’s just wearing a dress. It’s not about artifice. It’s about me just expressing myself.” She remarks in Unrepeatable, “Women wear what they want and so do I.” She has expressed a personal conviction that being transgender is caused by genetics and that, someday, this will be scientifically proven. In preparation for that day, she has had her own genome sequenced.
Izzard keeps her romantic life private, citing the wishes of her companions not wanting to become content for her show. She once dated Irish singer Sarah Townsend, whom Izzard first met while running a venue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1989. Townsend later created the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.
Izzard is an atheist. During the 2008 Stripped tour, she said, “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.” She has since described herself as a spiritual atheist, saying, “I don’t believe in the guy upstairs, I believe in us.”
Izzard supports Crystal Palace and became an associate director at the club in July 2012. She is also a train modeller