Eddie Izzard is as famous for being a transvestite as he is for being an outstanding comedian. Despite his penchant for high heels, lipstick and dresses, women not only love him, they find him sexy, too.

Interview by Ginny Dougary (from The Times UK)

Of make-up, men and fantasies

The idea is to meet and greet the press, travel by Eurostar to Waterloo - canvassing the views of passengers en route - before heading straight back again for the third night of his show in a sometime striptease joint in La Pigalle. As it was, we had been up the previous evening talking in the hotel bar - switching from French to English to Franglais - until three in the morning. He was still on a post-performance high, although there was nothing feverish or giddy about his demeanour. In fact, he seemed impassive, even expressionless, compared with the electric ooomph of his stage persona. But then his face was so stiff with make-up that it might have been hard for him to move his features. Still, his manner was cordial, if not exactly friendly, and he was relaxed enough to pass time in idle chit-chat.

What was most startling was his Look. I had seen him on television years ago when he made a grumpy appearance on one of Ruby Wax's shows, and more recently on Have I Got News For You?; watched one of his videos with friends; witnessed him in the flesh playing a serious role opposite Lindsay Duncan in David Mamet's The Cryptogram; and doing his one-man show in a small off-Broadway theatre in New York, where the audience sat on cushions on the floor, and the fans backstage included Helen Mirren and her American film producer husband. Each time I saw him I thought: Wow! Isn't he sexy! A sentiment, incidentally, that is shared by every woman I know. Straight men have a right to be puzzled by this phenomenon, since Eddie is as famous for being a transvestite as he is for being funny. What he calls himself is a male lesbian; so I suppose that makes all us women gay.

For anyone who was reared on the androgynous rock of the 1970s - Bowie and Jagger et al in their make-up and girly blouses; the Transsexual Transylvania of the Rocky Horror Show - there's nothing all that traumatic about the sight of a bloke in eyeshadow and a spot of nail polish. And there is something quite rock 'n' roll about Eddie, from the pounding techno that builds up the atmosphere before he careers on to the stage, to his PVC trousers and spiky peroxide hair. The style he favours - the one that suits him best, he says - is "the boy/girl-type thing." With the vogue for perfume ads featuring crop-haired boyish-girls and girlish-boys, Eddie's image - admittedly with a bit more slap than the norm - has a distinctively contemporary feel. This must be why, at first, I don't recognise the slim figure who appears in the foyer of the hotel.

Odd really, because unless the hotel was hosting a transvestites' convention, the likelihood of there being two trannies - or TVs as Eddie prefers to call them - staying at the same time was rather remote. The point was that this was Eddie as I had never seen him before: in a skirt, albeit a rather smart black Gaultier kilt, stockings, perilously high spike-heeled, knee-length boots and dated drag-queen make-up. When I told him that this, for me, was A Look Too Far, he seemed genuinely interested.

Although he has been "out" for a long time, he hasn't had as long as the rest of us to fine-tune what works for him and what doesn't, and so he chooses to value what people have to say rather than to take offence.

The next morning, at the Gare du Nord, Eddie is the closest he gets to looking straight. Which is still pretty out-there for most people. His maquillage is minimal: tinted moisturiser, powder and mascara. Helen, who is doing his make-up on this tour, says he has got the best skin-care routine of anyone she knows.

Inevitably, the Paris correspondents, mostly middle-aged men, confronted with the sight of sober-suited Vaz and high-heeled Izzard, go for the Odd Couple angle. Reading the reports later, I am struck by how inaccurate men are when writing about clothes and make-up. For the record, Eddie was wearing bronze nail polish on his long nails, a jaunty red and black plaid jacket, slim-cut black tuxedo pants and a black T-shirt.

Later, on the radio, when Keith Vaz is being quizzed on the complexities not of the euro, but of Eddie's wardrobe, I am amused to hear him describe his fellow traveller's get-up as "the kind of outfit I often see in the House of Commons". He was, of course, being non-gender specific.

Everyone wants to hear what Eddie has to say, and poor Keith has to battle to get any attention. Eddie deals in sweeping generalities - "I like the idea of us all working together. . . if we can do it, it might mean the end of war . . . a blueprint for the rest of the world . . ." - the big vision-type thing, as he might say, leaving the Minister to cope with the boring detail which, predictably, no one is interested in.

The Minister says that Tony (Blackadder) Robinson and the chief executive of Monarch Airlines have joined Eddie Izzard as unofficial champions of Labour's push on Europe - "the kind of people that ordinary British people relate to" - and presents the people's transvestite with a plaque.

On the Eurostar a miked-up Eddie and Keith are accompanied by two TV crews, one from the BBC, as well as an assortment of young men from the Foreign Office - policy wonks and chaps from the press office - and me. Despite our previous night's conversation into the early hours, Eddie has yet to show me the slightest flicker of recognition.

As we make our way down the carriages, I lob a few comments his way but he barely acknowledges them. Although I can see that he is both exhausted and focusing all his energy on the job at hand, this blanking or blocking off - a phrase he uses a lot about his survival technique when we finally get down to the interview at midnight - is rather unnerving. On one level it makes sense if one considers this interaction with the public as another performance and that he is suffering from pre-show nerves. On another, I wonder if his transvestism - and the aggro that he still gets from wearing women's clothes - has trained him not to respond to people on the periphery of his vision. Or maybe he just doesn't do small talk.

It's a funny old day. When Keith Vaz asks me what I'm doing on the train, I say I'm going to interview Eddie and he says: "Eddie who?" Er, Eddie Izzard, you know, who you're doing the roadshow with. "Ohhh," he says, "I thought you meant Eddie George." How new Labour to have the Governor of the Bank of England at the forefront of your mind. Eddie (Izzard) is definitely the euro star. English and French businessmen and students ask him for his autograph.

While Keith has the politician's knack of saying a few words and moving on, Eddie can't tear himself away. When possible, he launches into French. Since he is doing his entire Paris show en français - remarkably, since he has never got beyond O-Level standard - he probably needs all the practice he can get.

By the time we draw into Waterloo, Eddie's face has taken on a ghastly veal-coloured pallor. We are greeted by a pesky press agency journalist who is going for the provocative angle: "Some might say that having a comedian on the roadshow speaks for itself."

Eddie, who is a lifetime member of the European Movement, bridles: "I am a comedian, as you say, but I'm also someone who can speak my mind."

In the sanctuary of the Eurostar press lounge, we are joined by Angela Billingham, a former Labour MEP, who says she is still spitting blood and stone after losing her seat at the recent European election. "I'm sure you'll find it again," Eddie says like an arrested eight-year-old. Angela chides, "You're not too old to be smacked," and then wonders whether she is the token woman in the room.

Angela compares her finger-nails (frosted pink) to Eddie's muddy talons, and pronounces: "Oooo, I don't like yours at all." An exceedingly dapper Foreign Office man asks Eddie to sign a programme from Lenny, apologising for doing such a creepy thing. "It's the first time I've ever asked for an autograph," he confides to me. "I'm a huge fan. I've been to see him live four times." Eddie does another radio interview: "I know that Europe is not a very sexy subject . . . but the things you can do in Europe are sexy . . . like travel and having sex. In fact, More Sex For Europe is the government line, I think." We all laugh hugely.

But not everyone loves Eddie. Passing through security before re-embarkation, I am frisked by a jolly black woman who chortles at my Diana Ross joke, although she has heard that one a lot recently. Eddie totters on ahead and she turns to her male colleague and says: "Disgusting that is, and a man of that size." There is a look of real revulsion on their faces, and as I watch them watching Eddie's retreating form - a man in make-up and high heels who they have no idea is a star - I catch a glimpse of just how plucky he has had to be to be the way he is.

In the back room of La Boule Noire, behind a velvet curtain, Eddie is having a last-minute French lesson with his young teacher. It is hard to imagine anyone shining with the handicap of a foreign language - and after such a punishing day. He was up at 6.45 after hardly any sleep, had breakfast with various British Embassy bods, an interview on the Today programme, a rendezvous at the Senate for the 40th anniversary meeting of the Council of Europe, and that was all before we met at the Gare du Nord. But he does shine - mostly anyway, and with the help of a forgiving audience.

He wisely decides to address his transvestism straight away - saying, since we are in a notorious red-light area, that he is not "un travesti pute", ( prostitute) but "un travesti exécutif" (puffing out his chest) and, indeed, "un travesti action". It may not be widely known that Eddie's alternative career possibilities were civil engineering - although the word "civil" worried him - or joining the Army.

The audience seems slightly bemused but willing to fall for him. One of the reasons why his humour travels well is that his subjects are both epic and mundane enough to cross most boundaries: supermarkets, the Royal Family, the merits of Vanessa Paradis versus those of Johnny Depp, Aristotle and Socrates, dinosaurs, the Renaissance, the fall of the British Empire, Stonehenge, and a great riff on why whales are the DJs of the ocean, all woven together in a characteristically ingenious Eddie loop. Actually, his French is pretty good and getting better every night after the day's swotting. Nevertheless, when I ask the three women behind me what they thought of the show, they said that although it was "extraordinaire", there were just too many mistakes to carry off the big ideas.

Back at the hotel Eddie is sitting in my room, smoking for Europe and wearing my bathrobe because I have insisted on having the window open. He is clearly running on empty and still rather down about his performance, disappointed with himself for losing it on a couple of occasions (trying to master a Welsh accent in French proved particularly troublesome). When I remind him that he said the same thing about his New York show, he says that here the fear is much greater than usual, "even though you might have ideas that are nice to play with - 'the universe is, er, ugh, vairy beeg' - you are talking with the command of an eight-year-old and you're just not getting the curves on it."

At first he mutters away, very fast and very low, with a slightly sullen expression on his face. But the more up-front I am with him, the more engaged and engaging he becomes.

I wonder whether before Eddie came out in his true fantastic colours he might have come across as a bland, rather inspid character. I have interviewed a number of transsexuals and transvestites, and when they showed me old photographs of their pre-operative or blokey selves they always looked supremely dull fellows - almost as though their public selves were an exaggeratedly toned-down counterpoint to the flamboyance of their private compulsions. What would I have made of Eddie, for instance, if I had come across him when he was studying accountancy at Sheffield University?

He says he was a slob in a camel coat who didn't give a flying monkey's about his appearance. "I didn't really bother buying clothes because I felt that everything somehow looked wrong on me." But did you always have this surreal way of thinking? "In the sense of working out what I wanted to do type-thing?" No, the way you talk. "This way now or the way I am on stage?" Well, you're a bit like you are on stage off stage as well.

I try another tack. Would I have thought you were just an ordinary, boring boy if I had met you when you were a 17-year-old doing maths, physics and chemistry A levels?" "No," he says. "I would have attempted to make you laugh because this comedy has developed as a social tool."

Ah, the classic scenario then: lonely, isolated boy who finds popularity through becoming the class clown. But Eddie says it wasn't like that at all. It was not until he went to a school where, bizarrely, they didn't play football - a sport at which he had excelled at his previous school, where he played in the first team - that he showed any interest in becoming funny. He was never bullied, he says, because he was such a ferocious arguer: "I would do that small dog, bigger dog thing - ruffruffruffruffruff [he barks like a terrier] - and make a helluvalotta noise and the bigger dog would go 'Well, I won't bother with this one'," he says in his Sean Connery accent.

By the time he got to Sheffield - choosing a northern university to escape from the South - the only thing he wanted to do was to become a comedian, but he was dismayed to discover the student union would not support him taking an act to the Edinburgh Festival. He went anyway, writing and funding the gig himself. "It was a huge psychological thing and it was a crap piece of work, but we did it."

He dropped out of university and had a miserable 1980s, living in a "bungalow thingy" near Streatham Common with a bunch of fellow street performers, waiting to be discovered. At his second school he had begged the headmaster each year to give him a role in the Easter musical, but it was thought his talents were better employed playing the clarinet in the orchestra, and so there he remained.

Although he is still perplexed by the headmaster's obduracy - and told him so when he revisited the school - he reckons it was useful training learning how to endure setbacks. "I got to 18, 19, 20 and said 'OK, let's go, I'm ready, I'm cookin'. I've been waiting for this. I can make people laugh. I've been writing sketches . . . someone's bound to discover me' - but it just kept on not happening."

And when it finally did happen - after he graduated from the streets, to the Comedy Store, to his own sell-out show - that was the moment Eddie chose to come out.

Some commentators have erroneously linked Eddie's transvestism with the death of his mother when he was six, at which age he was dispatched to boarding school with his older brother. Eddie believes that his sexuality was genetically pre-ordained, and his earliest memories - as far back as the age of four - were of him wanting to wear girls' clothes.

But his mother's early death has certainly affected him in other ways. He describes himself as "emotionally compressed" and says he does not get too high or too low: "It's kind of a survival thing." The stand-up gives him the opportunity to get a lot of the highs out of his system, and he uses his serious roles (most recently as the late American comedian Lenny Bruce) to explore his anger and his lows. He has always needed his own space, physically and emotionally - long before he was famous - and lets people come to him rather than risk approaching them.

There is something so essentially detached about his presence - despite him having warmed up considerably by now - that I imagine he probably finds any kind of intimacy difficult. He says he inherited his reserve from his father, but the effect of his mother dying when he was so young was to make him emotionally stunted.

"In the scheme of things people lose entire families in concentration camps and so on but . . . I cried a lot and was caned a lot and just lost it at school, and then I got into this boy thing and couldn't kiss my Dad anymore."

The tears stopped abruptly at the age of 11, when he thought he had lost a fight because he cried. "So I blocked all that up and remained blocked until I was 19."

The turning point for him was in Sheffield when he tried unsuccessfully to stop a feral cat running into the road and saw it being run over. "It had broken its back; I picked it up and it struggled to breathe and then it just died, and I felt nothing.

"So I thought 'My God I am dead, I feel nothing. This is not good.' I took it to the vet's because I didn't know what else to do, and I forced myself to cry."

Do you still block stuff off? "Yes. There's still a natural compressed emotional state which isn't a great place to be, but then again I can be like this [he gestures to his appearance] and when people say negative things I'm not that bothered. It's a good survival technique."

In his show, while musing on the ghastliness of adolescence, Eddie had told us that he managed to lose his virginity only at 21. "Ce n'est pas cool," he said, before affecting to change his mind. "C'est cool, mais dans un style très sad-f***er." He has always been attracted to women and has had several long-term relationships. He used to turn up to Have I Got News for You with a girlfriend, and he is with someone now - though she does not wish to be discussed with journalists for obvious reasons.

I ask him if he is able to express himself and have rows and so on. "Oh yeah." And are you able to say weedy things? "Weedy things?" You know, be soppy. "Oh yeah. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't the kid who had been to public school - because they wouldn't ever let themselves cry or get in touch with their emotions. So I am in touch with my emotions, although I will steel over them.

"I mean, the whole thing of coming out as transvestite is a big key to how I work. Because the - arrrgh - amount of guts it takes to come out, and what I or any person who does come out has to go through - it's tough. And it's so visual as a TV and you get so much flak and you look such a mess initially in the frumpy transvestite phase when you're not out enough to say 'I wonder what this would look like?', which is what a normal boy or girl or man or woman would do."

Before we get into the grittiest of the nitty-gritty about what makes a TV tick - or, at any rate this TV - I feel that something must be cleared up. At which point, may I suggest that readers of a delicate disposition STOP READING NOW - after which warning if you do cancel your subscription to The Times we will know that you have been unable to resist temptation.

Right. Now if all of us women fancy Eddie, it is likely that somewhere down the line some of us must have imagined what it would be like to be physically entwined with him. And once one goes down that route, inevitably what enters one's mind is the penis-type thing. And so Eddie, I ask, do you use your penis penetratively? A question, incidentally, that I do not recollect ever having asked a man before, interviewee or otherwise. Perhaps being with someone who has to be brave every day of his life has an emboldening effect. And mercifully, he doesn't bat a (smokey grey and kohl-lined) eyelid.

Yes, he says, he does, "if the other woman is into the penis but if not, fine." I had always understood that transvestites were heterosexual men who simply had a fetish - a word Eddie dislikes, as I am to discover - for women's clothing. Transsexuals, on the other hand, were men who felt they were a woman trapped inside the wrong body, men who loathed their maleness and saw their penis as a constant physical rebuke.

But Eddie says TVs and TSs are on exactly the same path, it is just that the latter are farther down it. Until recently he described himself as a heterosexual, but got fed up with journalists writing that he insists on calling himself hetero, as though it were a mask for his gayness (he has never attempted to go to bed with a man) and drag queens accusing him of being a liar. Male lesbian, he thinks, fits the bill and avoids any suggestion that he is distancing himself from other sexual minorities.

But does he, like transsexuals, hate his penis? "The penis is immaterial," he says, which certainly sets him apart from the way most men view their equipment. "I don't think it's at all an aesthecically pleasing thing. I don't think, 'Heyyy, this penis, Gahhd, I'd like to put it on the mantelpiece. Isn't it hard, I venture, to use the penis in a feminine way? "Er, yes," he says. "So that's probably why we don't want penises. I've got breast envy."

You'd like a bosom? "Oh yeah. Just like teenage girls or some women think 'Oh, I wish I was bigger'. That's exactly what's going on with me." Have you ever tried putting a false bosom in? "I have and I did and I do," he says. So would you rather have a bosom than a penis? "Um. I've never done the either/or choice but, yeah." I don't understand, I say.

As Eddie is the only famous "out" transvestite in the world (he thinks, though he has heard that there might be a New Zealand politician who is also a TV) he does believe he has a mission to explain the way he is in order to promote a better understanding of less fortunate, more shamefully closeted men than himself. That is why he is always game to try out new theories and also, I sense, because he himself is still trying to grapple with the mystifying psychology of transvestism. So here, unveiled for the first time, is his new theory:

"Men - and disagree with me whenever you want - are stimulated visually. If women do the black dress, the high heels and the lippy, men go, 'Hey! Wow!' And it could be the same woman they haven't paid any attention to. The woman could be a complete bimbo and have no conversation and the man could be very articulate but still - Bam! - would wish to shag. Women? Not so much. They're stimultated more by . . ." Touch? "Touch and also personality. By a bloke who might be a curious-looking bloke. So the key points are the triggers. OK?" OK thus far.

"Now let me stay on the point because I think this is a bit of a breakthrough in explaining things. So TVs have an urge to be a woman. They're at home and they get the clothes and the make-up right and maybe they'll turn the lights down low so that the look is good, and they'll say 'Hey right, I look like a woman.' But then this two-step effect happens. Because they get visually stimulated - like clockwork - just like all men do. They have created this sexy image that they are then attracted to."

So it's masturbatory? "Yes, absolutely." So it's "I love . . . me"? "No. It's 'I love that image'. What they'd prefer to do is to make love to another woman and have lesbian sex. They'd like to be a woman and make love to another woman." Right, still with him, just about.

What I still find quite hard to understand is the clothing. In the past you have said that your desire sometimes to wear a provocative skirt rather than boring old trousers is no different from the way a woman dresses to please herself. But isn't the relationship of the transvestite with the actual gear eroticised? And if so, this is not the way most women relate to their wardrobe. He says he has watched women, something he does a lot, and has noticed the way that they will stroke a new pair of boots and though they are obviously not getting wildly turned on, they will say 'I love the feel of this. It makes me feel sexy.'

But it's not the same thing, is it Eddie? He says there are no sexy men's clothes apart from, say, a leather thong. Men's satin dressing gowns? "You find those wildly erotic?" he says, with disbelief. "There's nothing sensual or sexy for men. Male lingerie does not exist. Stockings do not exist. Socks are not going to get you going, 'Hey maaan, great socks, let's go!'

"Women have this vast variety of lingerie, stockings and tights and different patterns, and shoes, with different-sized heels, in red and black, and skirts - short, long, with slits - push-the-boob things . . . there's so much around in women's things that is erotic.

While men have: shirt shirt shirt jumper shirt jumper jacket jumper shirt jacket trousers trousers short trousers trousers flat shoes."

He says that while women wearing men's clothes confers on them a certain sort of power - and cites Marlene Dietrich as an example - men attack other men for wearing women's clothes because it is seen as a weakness: "And it's seen as being weak because they equate the clothing with being female, and female equals weak - which is wrong, because women have strong and weak characters, and so do men."

I say that part of the problem with transvestism is that there is an image of shame and humiliation and solitariness, and husbands ejaculating over their wives' clothing, and it's not a very attractive image. "Mmm. Absolutely." And then you come along and mix it and match it and have this very male way of being and it's no longer seen as something pathetic. "It's because it's out and knitted into society," he says thoughtfully.

I ask whether he's aware of how many women find him attractive. "Yes, it's off the scale," he says. "And very sexy women, too." He's attracted to all sorts of women, from boyish girls to those with Marilyn Monroe curves. He thinks a lot more women would be attracted to TVs if the men were as out and calm and relaxed about themselves as he is. Also women are turned on by the fact that it takes balls - so to speak - to go out there and be himself and not give a damn. And if he's given stick, he gives it right back - as a group of thugs discovered when they set upon him, and he not only fought them off but took them to court and won.

But he has noticed that a lot of the female fans who write him letters seem to feel compelled to explain why they are attracted to him. He compares it to women who sleep with women but insist they are not lesbians. (The same applies to men, presumably.) "So there's denial and we're not at the end of explaining things," he says. "But getting the truth out of people is difficult. They've got so many blocks in their heads that they can't tell themselves the truth. It's something right at the back of the quiet mind."

It is only towards the end of our conversation, and almost by chance, that I finally find an image for transvestism that works for me. I ask Eddie whether the erotic nature of transvestism isn't essentially narcissistic, and he reminds me that when Narcissus fell in love with his image in the water he didn't know that the face staring back at him was his own. And there's the key, I think. The transvestite at his most private, most sexually engaged, is actually disengaged from himself. He looks at his femaleness from the outside, rather than feeling it from within. And if that splitting of oneself is fundamental to your make-up, it might explain why there are other areas of detachment as well.

For most of our time together, despite the emphasis on sex, there is nothing charged or erotic about the atmosphere. Quite the opposite, if anything: it is more clinical, scientific and oddly impersonal. But very occasionally, when one becomes aware of holding a gaze for a fraction longer than is necessary or when Eddie turns an intimate question back to me, it feels for a moment as though something else is going on. Perhaps it's the dreamy lateness of the hour, the man sitting in your dressing gown, the shadow of his false eyelashes on his cheek.

At the end of the interview, Eddie says that what you need to do is to look at everybody's fantasies and line them all up and only then can you see what is normal and what is not. "Who doesn't have fantasies?" he asks. I don't think I do. "Actually, I've heard other women say that." Don't have time to...

"So you don't really have fantasies?" he asks softly. Not really. "You should get some," he breathes. Because they're fun? "Yeaaaahhh."

Like I said, he's sexy.