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Check out some awesome photos by Alfie Hitchcock who’s on tour with Eddie. He’s posting photos on his TWITTER account…

Photos of just Eddie are posted HERE.

[from Liverpool Echo]

EDDIE Izzard is musing, not untypically, on the existence or otherwise of the meaning of life.

“I don’t know,” he considers, “if there is one or not. But I do believe that you only get one life and you have to live it. That’s what I believe.”

He’s attempting to explain just why it is that his career, now 22 years in the making, has more facets than most.

REST OF ARTICLE (with pictures)

[from the times.co.uk]

Having devoted the best part of the autumn to undertaking a 1,100 mile jog around the UK – some 43 runs in 51 days – Eddie Izzard would be forgiven for putting his feet up and congratulating himself on his fund-raising good deeds for Sport Relief. But, no, marathon man is already up and about, rambling for Britain in a touring version of Stripped, the stand-up show he premiered last winter in the West End. You might expect to see a few pained hobbles. Yet here he is, bouncing about in a discreetly outlandish combination of jeans, stripey shirt and ringmaster’s black tail-jacket – the puppyish picture of zing and zest.

Erring on the side of modesty, Izzard only briefly alludes to his ordeal. “I did this run recently which was just to lose weight. It was a bit insane,” he concedes, in that drawly, muttery, posh-urchin way of his, before suggesting that we could all do it because our ancestors were forever running back and forth, hunting and gathering, and being chased by bears.

I’m paraphrasing here, of course. Once Izzard, 47, is in full flow, you can only dash after his quicksilver train of imagination, making incomplete notes. The overarching conceit of the evening, underpinned by much mock-erudition, is that there’s no plan in the universe.

We’re given a wilfully idiosyncratic beginner’s guide to creation, evolution, the emergence of civilisation and so on, all of it pointing to one conclusion, which is that we’re on our own, and we just have to make the best of it.

If you can quarrel with Izzard’s underlying faith in human nature to succeed where religion fails (“Don’t believe in God, believe in us”), there’s little disputing that his surrealistic, scattershot musings betray the divinity of comic genius.

Among myriad highlights, there’s his notion (apropos the dullness of farming) of wedging a trumpet on a chicken’s face – to create a “jazz chicken”, the enactment of a Roman soldier deliberately and pretend-delightedly impaling himself on the spear of an advancing Greek phalanx, and his evocation of a giraffe, signalling, by means of charades, the approach of a tiger.

Yes, seeing him in a stadium, his every move video-relayed, can be like watching a giant TV, but the warmth, lust for life and sheer swaggering pizzazz of this eternally boyish jester transcend the sterility of the occasion.

After 25 years of perfecting his burbling personality, Eddie has become entertainment incarnate.

[from whatsonne.co.uk]

NEXT year’s Great North Run could have a new celebrity face in the running pack, in the shape of Eddie Izzard.

The comedian told the Chronicle today he would consider taking part in the event – having successfully run 1,200 miles around the UK for Sport Relief. That’s 43 marathons in 51 days.

“I’ve never done an organised one, so that is something I must do,” says Eddie, who is at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle on Thursday and Friday next week.

“Never say never, so you may see me there. I am certainly keeping up my training and doing two marathons a week.”

Eddie admitted he was absolutely exhausted after his nationwide trek – which raised more than £200,000 for Sport Relief – ended last month.

“It was good to do, it was very tough. I didn’t really enjoy the running, but I enjoyed the stopping.

“Towards the end, I got more into the running. I knew I could do it without it being too hellish. The pain had cut down. the first two weeks were very painful and after that it got less painful.

“To see people happy to come out and run with me. It was wonderful. A very primal thing.”

I suggest it was a huge undertaking for him, but Eddie replies: “I think anyone could do it. No- one has really tried it that much so, if motivated enough, then you would do it. If you were being chased by a bear, you would do it!

“The motivation in the head is very important. It was so tiring and knackering, though, and initially the shredding in my feet was terrible. You get used to it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Eddie recently broke box office records by selling out a five-week residency in London’s West End in less than 48 hours.

With bootleg tickets changing hands for thousands of pounds, Stripped was indisputably the must- have tickets on both sides of the Atlantic, coming hot on the heels of an American sell-out tour which played across 34 US cities – including three packed out nights at New York’s legendary Radio City Music Hall.

Stripped arrived at the Lyric theatre, where the live DVD – out on November 23 – was filmed and played to overwhelming critical acclaim. The show sees Eddie back at his very best.

It comes to the Toon complete with a fleet of Stripped trucks, three LED screens, nine set screens and sky trackers.

In January next year, he will become only the fourth comedian ever to play Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Eddie has been hailed as one of the foremost stand-ups of his generation.

He takes ideas and situations and extrapolates them into bizarre, tangential, absurd and surreal comic narratives.

Since his first stage appearance on London’s West End in 1993, there have been a succession of sell-outs and critically-acclaimed international tours.

His musings have earned him countless awards, including two Emmys. While initially renowned as a comedian, he is now equally respected as a film, theatre and TV actor.

Earlier this year, he shared the big screen with Tom Cruise in Valkyrie and, over Christmas, he will star opposite Joely Richardson and Dougray Scott in the BBC’s remake of Day of the Triffids.

Of Stripped, he says: “I did the five weeks in London as an archetype of what I am now doing in arena.

“I wanted to make sure the material was in a good place.

“I’m looking forward to Triffids coming out. A great cast and great story. I really enjoyed doing it – I play a charismatic sociopath.

“Filmed drama is such a long time before you see what you have done. Valkyrie took a year and a half – it is so different to what you get doing stand-up.”

Eddie has announced that as part of his current Stripped European stand up tour he will appear at The University of Sheffield Drama Studio on Oct27th.

Tickets go on sale at noon on Fri 23rd Oct. For tickets visit:
http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_northeast&query=detail&event=355109

Oh and here’s a pic of one of five vans that will be shlepping his arena stuff around:

The show, which tapes several months in advance, has already lined up its talent for the year – and this time a lot of them come from the United Kingdom. “We can get anyone British except the queen,” jokes Jean. “We have Eddie Izzard coming, we have Chris Martin from Coldplay and we have Sacha Cohen who plays an Israeli tour guide, who’s extremely angry. He was great. Really, really funny.”

FULL ARTICLE

[from WalesOnline.co.uk]

A NEW film about the rise of stand-up legend Eddie Izzard will pinpoint his mother’s death in Wales as the moment that drove him to perform.

Culled from exhaustive amounts of the award-winning comic’s archived home video footage, Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story reveals how he turned applause into a substitute for his late mother Dorothy’s affections.

The movie, due out next year, gives a never-seen-before insight into the workings of the enigmatic star’s mind, culminating with Izzard confessing: “Everything I’ve ever done is an attempt to get her back.”

Izzard’s long-term publicist and friend Karon Maskill said the funnyman, who was only six in 1967 when his midwife mum succumbed to cancer while living in Skewen, near Neath, spent nearly a decade helping to slavishly assemble the film. It traces his rise from being the young son of travelling BP worker Harold in Yemen to the global star he is today.

But Karon said it was the family’s time in South Wales that would provide the catalyst for Eddie becoming the man we all know and love.

“Those were very happy days for him but when Dot died it left a huge hole in his life, as you can imagine when a small child loses a parent like that.

“Not only that, but her death also had a devastating effect on the family as a whole because Harold was left looking after both Eddie and his brother which, when you’re on your own in another country and trying to hold down a full-time job, is no easy task.”

The boys were packed off to boarding school in Porthcawl – an experience Eddie hated – before the family moved on again to East Sussex a few years later.

“He went on to study financial management and accountancy at Sheffield University but ended up spending most of his time in the drama department,” explained Karon.

“From then on I don’t think he did any work whatsoever and left the course convinced the stage was for him, having become enamoured with the likes of Monty Python and Fry and Laurie.

“He struggled for years, doing street theatre, attempting stand-up and not being very good,” she added.

“But then in 1991 he did a charity gig in London, way down the bill, and blew everyone away with this rambling sketch about being raised by wolves.

“After that things just went crazy.”

The film comes shortly after Izzard hit the headlines for running 43 marathons in 51 days across the UK for Sport Relief despite not being athletic. He even added miles onto his Herculean feat to pass by his childhood house in Wales.

The funnyman first came up with the idea for the documentary when he returned to Britain after a long spell acting on Broadway in A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award.

“He came home and suddenly realised he had no comedy material at all to take on tour, so someone suggested he just go on stage and talk about his childhood,” said Karon.

“So he did, and that got the ball rolling on Believe.

“And, without maybe having realised it before, it slowly dawned on him that the reason he put himself out there like that was because an audience could give him that love back, that feeling that was what was missing from his life which normally he’d have got from his mum.”

She added that Izzard fans would also be in for a treat, the documentary showing exclusive clips of Eddie’s very early routines.

“Oh, there’s great stuff on there, like the act he’d do up in Edinburgh where he’d try getting out of a straitjacket,” said Karon.

“A lot of it is a real reflection of that whole period in the ’80s when alternative comedy was king and stand-up was being heralded as the new rock and roll.”

So, did Eddie always have that unique delivery style of his?

“Yeah, he’s always talked b******s,” joked Karon.

By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: October 16, 2009

Several things might strike you as odd about “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,” a documentary about the cross-dressing British comedian who increasingly is also a mainstream actor.

One is that the film is framed as a response to what, at least on this side of the Atlantic, seems like a tempest in a teapot, and an ancient one at that: complaints that Mr. Izzard once used some old material in a show billed as “all new.” Another is that this worshipful film is by Sarah Townsend, who, when she appears in it, is identified as “director and former girlfriend.”

But such stuff won’t matter to Mr. Izzard’s many fans, who in “Believe” are given a chance to see an abundance of footage of him before he became famous (and before he publicly wore the fishnets). There are snippets of his early efforts at sketch comedy in the 1980s at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, shots of him as a street performer at Covent Garden in London. And in pretty much all of them, he’s awful.

“It was just incredible,” says André Vincent, who was also playing the streets at the time. “He died so regularly. But, you know, he stuck with it. He went, ‘No, this is what I find funny.’ ”

The guy’s persistence alone will make you an admirer if you’re not already one.