In our world of cheap celebrity, the rules of fame demand that stars remain stars as long as they cling to what tatty fragments of mystique they can tear from our clutching hands and prying lenses. Once we know too much, we turn away, bored, and look for the next Tom Cruise or Robbie Williams or Lindsay Lohan — the one who hasn’t torn out their heart in a tear-stained confession, like a rebounding lover who thinks this is more than a one-night stand. Eddie Izzard, of course, broke that rule a long time ago. Throughout his 20-odd years in the public eye, he has been completely open about himself, his sexuality, his life, his ambition, his fears and his hopes. By rights, we should all have moved on. And yet, somehow, he manages to retain his glamour. The more you think you know him, the more elusive he seems.

It may be that we are unfamiliar with his kind of truth. Performers and duplicity are so expertly intertwined that we can’t quite believe that someone would speak openly about being (in his own words) “a straight transvestite” if there weren’t a tabloid pack at their door. Izzard was once on a chat show with Nigella Lawson, and she couldn’t let his sexuality lie. She knew, she proclaimed, why he wore women’s clothes. It was because his mother died when he was young.

“I said, I don’t think it is,” he recalls. “She said, it is. I said, it isn’t. She said, well, I think it is.” He smiles. “I asked if she was a lesbian. She said no, so I said, ‘Back off, baby, because this is my area.’” He adds a grim little laugh. “I had spent a long time looking at this; I’d talked to gay men and lesbian women and asked, ‘What do you guys think?’ About 98% of them said, yeah, genetic. I knew I was a transvestite before my mum died — before she was ill. Because I didn’t know she was dying when I was a kid — I just thought she was ill. Kids get ill, and then they get better. I didn’t know that thing was a death thing.”

He shakes his head, dispelling this jagged sidetrack, and returns to his theme. “So I knew, ‘Hey, I wanna wear a dress,’ when I was four or five. But if it turns out it was to do with her, then I’m happy to go with it, because I’m just looking for truth on this thing. What I do think is that the death of my mother is linked to my desire to perform. She was a very loving mother, and when she disappeared, there was a massive lack of her love. And then, when I was eight, I saw this play, and there was a kid getting all this laughter and applause, and I thought, I have to do that. And it just stayed very locked in.”

When Izzard tells the story, it’s hard physically to feel the tragedy it represents. He’s a big man — strong, smart and with the kind of face you’d instinctively turn to for reassurance. You can’t zoom in on the eight-year-old child, alone in a darkened theatre, desperately missing his mum, still not quite sure where she’s gone or why she took her love away and wishing he could be that boy in the spotlight, protected by the warmth of the applause.

Now, 37 years later, he’s close to giving that boy the kind of substitute affection he craved. It’s taken a long time, and it’s involved plenty of detours, but he’s almost there. He’s almost broken America. Last month, the FX channel debuted a dark, edgy drama called The Riches to ecstatic reviews from both the highbrow New York Times and the playful Entertainment Weekly. Izzard plays the male lead, Wayne Malloy, a grifter from America’s Irish traveller community. Since one of Malloy’s parents was a “buffer” — a citizen with a house and a job — it took some time for him to prove he had the chops to be a grifter. In the end, he became so good, he wooed a princess of the blood called Dahlia, played by Minnie Driver, who was supposed to enter a marriage that had been arranged since childhood.

By the time the series starts, they have three kids, and Dahlia has just finished a two-year stretch for a con gone wrong. Malloy is having an existential crisis, deliberately fouling his own game to see if he can save the situation, and they’ve fallen out with the rest of the clan. Things are looking bleak, so when the family accidentally kill a wealthy couple who were moving to the coast, he suggests they adopt their name — the Riches — and give civilian life a try.

The show mixes My Name Is Earl’s craving for redemption with The Sopranos’ account of America’s underbelly and Weeds’s take on the perversion of suburbia. So far, the critics have embraced it — The New York Times said it “deserves to be a hit, generating as much media attention and internet chatter as Deadwood, Nip/Tuck or 24” — and the pilot pulled in 3.8m viewers, more than its stablemate Courteney Cox’s series Dirt, making it the second-most-successful FX drama launch. There’s still a little way to go with numbers, but Izzard is inches away from the kind of status accorded to barely a busload of Brits in the history of Hollywood. At the same time, he has landed scenes in the film Ocean’s 13, a voice role in Jerry Seinfeld’s animated Bee Movie and two other movies, in preproduction. The eight-year-old is jumping around inside him with something that could pass for glee.

“America — I mean, that’s the No 1 court at Wimbledon.” He spreads his hands out in a big Eddie Izzard embrace. “I wanted to act when I was eight, and I discovered films when I was 10, and I thought, well, that’s it. It was just a question of how I could get there. Some people just luck in here at 19. Me, it took 109 years. My analogy is: I’m hacking away up the mountain just because the mountain wasn’t there when I needed it. I wanted to get my stuff going at 18, but it didn’t start till I was 30. My first year of performing in Edinburgh was 1981. I saw Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson win the Perrier award. My last year in Edinburgh was 1993. That was 12 years, right there.”

Strangely — or maybe inevitably — the reason he needed the particular kind of applause you get only if you are a hit in the biggest entertainment industry in the world was also the reason he was denied it for so long. His father worked for BP as an auditor, taking the family around the world with his work. When his mother died, six-year-old Eddie and his eight-year-old brother were sent to boarding school, where he cried up to the age of 11. After that, he shut down. He was good at boy things — such as football and the cadets. He even thought of joining the army. Eventually, however, he prepared to follow his father, studying maths and financial accounting at the University of Sheffield.

It wasn’t the quickest route into showbiz, and he decided to drop out. “Cleverly, I did work out that if I got a degree, it would be more difficult to stick at performing.” He cocks his head to one side. “I’m 89 to 90% certain that I wouldn’t have fallen back on it, but it was accounting, for God’s sake. You can get a job with that no matter what the economy’s doing. So I burnt my bridges with a flame-thrower.”

There was only one problem. “I’m the kind of person people say, ‘You’re shit,’ to for quite a while,” he says with a cheerful grin. “I had that with stand-up. I couldn’t do it at the beginning. And before that, I couldn’t do street performing. Street performing actually made me, because I really couldn’t do it, but I stayed at it. I completely collapsed, confidence-wise, to nothing. Zero. But I got it back, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I just stayed there, plugging away, until one day I was talking to people in Covent Garden to get them to watch my double act, and I realised I was doing my own show. That was the beginning of my voice.”

For someone who was a complete failure for a decade, he remained extraordinarily strategic about his career. He turned down children’s television on the grounds that it was a dead end, and he rejected comedy offers to save himself for straight acting. Curiously, he credits his sexuality for his analytical approach. At Sheffield, he’d repeatedly asked his GP for psychiatric appointments to talk about his transvestism. None was ever made.

“I had to analyse my own brain,” he says. “I closed the curtains and tried to think beyond the wall I’d built up. I came to the conclusion that guilt and shame were two things it wasn’t worth having. I didn’t get to the why of it, but I thought guilt and shame could f*** off. Before that, I couldn’t analyse anything. You don’t see exact things — you see patterns. But this analysis, I began to realise, could be used about anything.”

He came out as a transvestite to friends when he was 23, and to his father when he was 29 — “We’d just watched Crystal Palace lose, so I was a bit nervous, but he was fine” — and then turned his analytical mind across the Atlantic. “LA is the hub that everything in the world flows around,” he explains. “If you get the UK, you still have to smash round all the different countries. I learnt French to play Paris, and I’m getting my German better so I can do Berlin. But if you’re in a US film or TV show, they spend all this money marketing you around the world. I thought about trying to do a film or TV, but it was high stakes, and if it failed, it marked your card. I worked out you had to get New York, because it’s the tastemaker for the whole of North America. So, in 1996, I decided to play there.”

He had it all worked out. He had to get the theatre critics, so he ignored the comedy clubs. He had to get a good New York Times review, because that’s like getting every British newspaper rolled into one. So he played four weeks in an 80-seat theatre, came back in 1997 and played 250 seats, then booked the WestBeth Theater for four months. He even held back tickets to stop Europeans coming in — “European-to-American word of mouth doesn’t work” — and got what he wanted through sheer force of will. Robin Williams saw him and agreed to produce some West Coast dates, and suddenly he was opening in San Francisco, with Sean Penn and the mayor in the crowd. A writer from Maverick pictures was also there. She liked him, loved his HBO special, and before you could say “four decades later”, he was taking a meeting at Maverick. In 2004.

That’s an astonishing level of self-control, I tell him, slightly awed at this relentless pursuit of the plan. Didn’t he ever despair? “I had a positive attitude,” he says. To say the least. “You’re a transvestite with a career, you’ve got to have a positive attitude,” he shrugs. “Some people get everything when they’re 18. Ryan Gosling is a great actor, Oscar-nominated when he’s 26. I’m 45, and I’ve finally got a lead role. When we finished the pilot, I toasted season four, and I kept doing that all the way.”

Does that mean he’s finally happy? He thinks for a minute. “I’m always optimistic,” he suggests. “And I’m usually quite content. I never get overtly happy because . .. [long pause] . . . if your mum dies when you’re six, you’re always ready for something to go wrong. You don’t take anything for granted. You just try to keep moving things forward. And you have to keep climbing or you go backwards. Jack Nicholson said, always be number two: then you’re always pushing forwards and you’re never about to be over.”

So he’s spelt it all out — he was born a transvestite, his mother’s death made him a performer, he wanted to reach the top but it took ages to master his craft. He’s kept nothing back — we have even discussed his strict diet regime (“I have low metabolism, high stamina. I worked out that 5,000 years ago my type was the one who ran for a week to catch a hog, and that was all I ate for a month”) — and yet he still feels slightly distant. Maybe it’s because the work and the honesty and the serotonin rush that his comedy provides are all calling out to one person, but she will never reply.

There’s a journalist’s trick — more of a get-out clause, really — that you use at the end of an interview: “Is there anything I haven’t asked you?” It just means you’re covered, that you’ve given the interviewee a chance to put their case. He smiles when I ask that. “Journalists are all like psychia-trists, in a way. They’re always asking me what I’d ask, but I don’t have any questions.” I say a psychoanalyst once advised me that if you had only one question, and you wanted to find out the most you possibly could about a person, you should ask how they got on with their parents. He pauses.

“Well, I’m quite like my dad, and I loved my mother and she died.” There’s a very long pause as we stare at the table.

“Which proves there’s no God,” he finally cuts in. “Because if there is a God, he’s a bastard. You rack up all the deaths we’ve had — stackloads. That’s one bastard of a God if he’s up there. And why doesn’t he ever shave?”

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