Izzard was born February 7, 1962, in Aden, Yemen, the youngest son of an English couple—Dorothy Ella, a midwife and nurse, and Harold John Izzard, an accountant who was working in Yemen with British Petroleum. A year after his birth, Izzard's family moved to the UK. His mother died of cancer in March 1968, when Izzard was 6 years old.
Izzard found some degree of solace in comedy after the death of his mother. He drew particular comfort from the works of Monty Python, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and the early Benny Hill. After an education at St Bede's Preparatory School and at Eastbourne College, he began to toy with stand-up at the University of Sheffield and, after being ingloriously kicked off his accountancy degree course, he took his act into the streets. Having spent a great deal of the 1980s working as a street performer in Europe and the United States, Izzard moved his act into the stand-up comedy venues of Britain, first appearing at The Comedy Store in London in 1987. He refined his material throughout the '80s, and in the early '90s he finally began earning some measure of recognition, though not in the guise in which he would later become famous.
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