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Finally,
a Brit who's not only beyond the fringe but looks smashing in it.
The transvestite comic Eddie Izzard-John Cleese calls him
"the funniest man in England"-grafts Richard Pryor onto Margaret
Thatcher, while stealing the best shoes of both. In an America
newly obsessed with London nightlife, he's won a rabid cult. Izzard
has just ended a four-month gig at New Yorks' Westbeth Theatre Center,
the hip downtown home to David Sedaris and Sandra Bernhard. There
he delivered Dress to Kill, a stand-up riff on cats, Cats, geopolitics,
and Engelbert Humperdink.
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Next he
takes the show to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Clad in a sarong
or Gaultier smock, he's a pudgy Billy Idol, in nail polish and eyeliner,
gone to seed in Kansas trailer park. "Look, I fancy women," Izzard
reports. "I'm just a transvestitie-a lesbian trapped in a man's
body. Women have total clothing rights, so why shouldn't men? I'll
wear whatever I want." But Dress to Kill skirts the slap-stick yawn
of, say, a Mayor Giuliani in pumps. Izzard's act is both celebral
and silly, in the loony tradition of Monty Python and Dame Edna.
It's also blissfully free of scatology, screaming and drug-rehab
patter. This month, Izzard zips his lip for The Avengers, Hollywood's
take on the English sixties spy sensation. It may just be this cross-dresser's
crossover-though, ironically, he settles for topcoat and breeches
and says nary a word. "Yeah, I basically stand around chewing gum
and snarling," says Izzard, who plays Sean Connery's henchman, In
a better world, Izzard, not Uma Thurman, would drag Emma Peel toward
the millennium. Though Thurman gets the bodysuit-and Ralph Fiennes-it's
Izzard who walks off with the movie. He's also in trousers for Velvet
Goldmine, the oddball surprise of Cannes (set for November). Izzard
plays a he-man of a rock agent to Ewan McGregor's Bowie-ish glamster.***
How to explain these leaps of character-and couture? "Beats me,"
Izzard says, teasing his frosted-blonde locks. "I can tell you that
I was born on February 7, 1962, 150 years to the day after Charles
Dickens," he adds. "This combined with the fact that Pluto was ascending
at the time, means that I tend to put on weight easily. Does that
help?"
*** Named
McGregor since he's the known name, but Jonathan Rhys Meyer's character
is the one Izzard's character was the agent for.
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