Best-known for her surreal and digressive stand-up, British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard was born on February 7, 1962, in Aden, Yemen, where her English parents -- Dorothy Ella, a nurse and midwife, and Harold John Izzard, an accountant -- worked for British Petroleum. Izzard worked as a street performer and in smaller comedy venues throughout the mid-to-late 1980s; her big break came when she appeared in Hysteria III, a 1991 AIDS fundraiser held at the London Palladium, and did her now-famous Raised by wolves sketch. After that, she drew bigger and bigger audiences, and in 1993 hired the Ambassadors Theatre in Londons West End for the first of many successful one-man shows. With Eddie Izzard: Live at the Ambassadors (1993), she was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award (outstanding achievement) and won her first British Comedy Award for top stand-up comedian. She returned to the West End the next year with her second one-man show, Eddie Izzard: Unrepeatable (1994), and soon thereafter made her West End debut in a drama, as the lead in the world premiere of David Mamets The Cryptogram with Lindsay Duncan; her success led to her second starring role, in 900 Oneonta.