Comedian Eddie Izzard talks to Jan Moir about ambition, coming out as a transvestite - and his difficulties with girls

Eddie Izzard believes he has the genetic make-up and physical structure of some-one who is disigned for "battling away at things", and I can see what he means. He has a rather square head atop a welt of chunky shoulder, then his body tapers down to slim, feminine hips and small feet. If you tucked him under your arm, he would make an excellent battering ram; he is also the perfect shape to be fired from a cannon. As he weaves his way across a crowded film set, he walks at an angle - sloping forwards - as if ready to butt any misfortune that may come his way.

Despite this pugnatious bearing, Izzard is not aggressive - anything but. A dedicated polyglot, he has learned to say "Hey, just be cool" in several languages, and will do anything to avoid a fight. On the streets, where he sometimes chooses to dress in heels and lipstick, he needs a peaceable strategy to cope with unwanted or abusive attentions.

"Once you start talking," he says, "the danger level drops by 50 per cent. Unless I talk to people, I might seem like a Martian to them."

He greets me in a cordial relaxed manner, although there is a hint of reserve - as if we had known each other for years but had never particularly bonded. We are in Austria, in a former army camp on the outskirts of Vienna, where Izzard is filming ALL THE QUEEN'S MEN with co-stars Matt Le Blanc and James Cosmo. It is a Second World War action comedy in which Izzard plays a bisexual transvestite - as opposed to the heterosexual transvestite he is in real life - ordered to steal an Enigma coding machine from a German factory.

As the employees there are all female, the principals spend much of the film disguised as women, in an attempt to infiltrate the workplace. Izzard, of course, is thrilled about this - frocks and army capers are two of his major obsessions - and he permits himself an affectionate chuckle at the discomfort of his colleagues.

"Its obviously an ordeal for them; they want to get their skirts off. They say, 'look, my hem got caught in this tank, I'll have to take it off now.' And i'm like, 'Hey Can I get this dress taken in a bit more?" he says, clinching imaginary hadfuls of material at his waist.

Today, however, his film costume consists of a macho, workaday khaki T-shirt, scratchy serge trousers, gaiters and bully boots. The only feminine touches are his long fingernails filed into perfect ovals and the fact that beneath his steel toecaps, his toenails are painted silver.

He has wanted to wear women's clothes since he was four, and began "coming out" as a transvestite in his early twenties. These days, his insistance on his "total clothing rights" - why, he asks, should girls get all the good stuff? - hardly seems extreme, particularly in the showbusiness world he frequents. Yet it has not been easy.

"I am constantly trying to access my whole girl side, trying to define what my sexuality is all about," he says. "I still haven't got the answers, it is still a bit confusing. And I know that some sections of society find me abhorrent."

Does he find that hurtful?

"Youu learn to grow a thick skin,"

He is open about the fact that he has sex with women, not men, and never tires of explaining that no, he is not and never has been homosexual. "I'm not gay. I'd say if I was. But try as I might, I just can't get my hat off to fancying men," he says airily.

He has considered having a sex change operation, but decided against it because he suspects - correctly, I fear - that instead of becoming a vision of feminine beauty, he would just look like a blocky little bloke who'd had a sex change. He likes to describe himself as a butch lesbian, and is therefore sexually attracted to female lesbians who are not, for obvious reasons, necessarily attracted to him.

What is in no doubt, however is the fact that may women find him wildly desirable. He more than fulfills the criteria demanded in any dream date magazine poll - sensitive, nice bottom, sense of humour - and has the added , seductive ability to note when you've curled you're eyelashes or bought a new lipstick. He talks in a soft, husky rumble that means you have to sit close to hear what he is saying, and I notice him noticing my newly cut hair in an interested way. In short, being with him is intoxicating.

We stroll past a platoon of buzzcut extras fro No 9 Commando Unit and then pass by Le Blanc - who stars as Joey in the television series Friends - looking glossily handsome in his millitary uniform.

"Mmmm... Matt was a bit worried about me, about what I was going to be like," says Izzard. "But now he says i'm his favourite transvestite."

It is difficult to capture in print the hilarity of much of what Izzard says; the unpredictable swoops of his conversation, his measured hesitation over certain words. In his trailer, we gossip about the notorious chocolate bar product placement at Anthea Turner's recent nuptials, and while I am mired in bitchy detail - Eddie, she was wearing her wedding dress while she ate it - he has flown off on another tangent altogether.

"The Spice Girls will saying, 'Ooh tacky'. The Bay City Rollers will say, 'Hey. We wouldn't go there,'" he says. I can hardly say how insanely funny I find this, but it also encapsulates the essence of Izzard's humour: the ability to be amusing without being cruel.

Edward Izzard was born in 1962 in Aden, where his father worked as an accountant for BP. The family moved to Wales and then to Sussex, where he attended a minor public school before going to Sheffield University to study accounting and finacial management. After a year, he was kicked off the course - "I got zero in maths" - and went to try his luck at the Edinburgh Festival. He was a flop. In fact, years of flopping followed - as a street comedian, as a stand-up - but Eddie kept pushing. In 1991, he was a Perrier award nominee and two years later he won the British Comedy Award for stand-up.

"I need fear," he says. "I need fearful things to spur me on. If a goal is unwinnable, then it is also unloseable."

Despite his confrontational reputation today he was frightened of telling his father he was a transvestite, and only plucked up the courage to do so when he was 29 years old. "Dad was very cool about it. He said my mum would have been too, which was very nice."

Izzard's mother died of cancer when he was six years old, and this is the fault line that runs right through his life; one that can still make him gently crack today. A needy child, he was forever calling out for lemonade and hot drinks in the middle of the night, treats that were always lovingly delivered by his mother.

"The loss doesn't get better. Time passes. The brain deals with it, but I don't think i'll ever get over it. It is hellish and there is no bloody logig in it, he says. "But people lost their entire families in concentration camps. Others have had a worse time than me."

Another thing he never tires of explaining is that his mothers death was not a factor in his transvestism - he can recall wanting to wear girls' clothes when he was four, but apparantly he never wanted to wear her clothes. After her death, he cried intermittently for a year, then was emotionally frozen untill he was 19. When he bagan having relationships with women, he didn't know how to cope.

"Being in love was like a drug, a heavy outpouring of emotion on my part. I opened up and they ran off. I had to learn to calm down. Now, i'm pretty good," he says, although he acknowledges that his mother's death has left him prone to destroying relationships. "I don't want to lose people, because i have experienced such loss before. And I don't want to open up because of the problems with my initial relationships."

Lter that evening, we meet for dinner in the candlelit courtyard of his Conrad-designed Viennese hotel. I had been intrigued by what he would choose to wearand now don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved by his scrubbed face,T-SHIRT AND JEANS. He wears drag - though he hates that expression - less and less these days, and quite often, he can't even be bothered to put on make-up. Just like a girl in fact.

Ordering vegetable lasagne - he has been on a diet, he's trying to eat sensibly - and a glass of white wine, he looks tired. When he speaks, his voice ebbs and flows like a sumer tide, as it has done all day; he is loud when talking about his sexuality or his career, quieter when we touch on difficult subjects such as his mother's death or his girlfriend.

By the time you read this, Izzard will know whether or not he has won any of the trio of awards for which he has been nominated this year, and unsurprisingly, he is keen to talk about them. The Emmys are inportant - the Oscars of the American television industry - and he has been shortlisted in three catagories for his Dressed To Kill comedy special, a collection of clips taken from his 1998 US tour.

"I have a very good chance of winning at least one," he says, in a deceptively mild manner, for he is a man of haunting ambition. It is hard to imagine another British comic who would dare to embark on such a carefully planned strategy of world domination.

A surrealist transvestite might not be the obvious choice as one of Britain's most poular comics, yet Izzard is adored here not just for his wit but for his qualities of courage, tolerance and eccentricity - a trinity of virtues forever dear to the national heart. And the Americans seem to love him too, although Izzard's routines may sound like particularly English whimsy musings on flip-flops, soft fruit, skiing elephants and that perennial puzzler: if bees make honey, why don't earwigs make chutney? He contends, however that comedy is human, not national, and claims to have proved it by performing in Paris (speaking in French). He now has plans to play in Berlin (in German) and is attempting to learn the language, anxious that his progress may be hampered by absorbing Vienesse speech patterns.

"I need, I must have High German," he cries.

Yet he remains suprisingly inarticulate when it comes to the language of the heart. Back in London, Izzard has a house in Notting Hill that he shares with his mysterious girlfriend, whose identity he protects so assiduously that one can't help wondering if she exists at all.

He claims to be boring at home and difficult to live with, which I don't doubt for a moment. Although blessed with many good qualities his overriding characteristic is what he describes as his "emotional compression". This makes him seem oddly derelict, even when having the jolliest conversation. When I ask him if he misses his girlfriend and is missed in return, he grimaces as if I were pulling out one of his perfect silver toenails. "Yes", he says finally. "But home is not a place. Home is in my head."

And when he does go home, he never unpacks his suitcases. That is all we need to know.