Barry Humphries | Dame Edna Everage Barry Humphries | Dame Edna Everage

Barry Humphries February 17, 1934 - April 22, 2023

Dame Edna Everage in her lilac-coloured hair and over-the-top eyeglasses is a character played by the Melbourne comedian Barry Humphries.

Long before she was known as "Dame Edna", Humphries first portrayed the character of Aunt Edna Everage on screen, in the 1972 film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie where Humphries played her as a traditional Aunt.

While Humphries freely states that Dame Edna is a character he plays, Dame Edna consistently denies being a fictional character or drag performer, and refers to Humphries as her "entrepreneur"or manager.

Indeed, Dame Edna has frequently said that the thought of a man dressing up as a woman for entertainment purposes is repulsive.

As Dame Edna, Humphries has written several books and hosted various television shows. In 1979, Dame Edna was the subject of a BBC Arena mockumentary: "La Dame aux Gladiolas."

Source: Dame Edna Everage - Wikipedia

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.

Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson, and Barry Humphries are wholly owned subsidiaries of The Barry Humphries Group.

Dame Edna Everage awarded keys to the City Of Melbourne by Mayor John So on Wednesday 24th August 2006.

Dame Edna Place
Dame Edna Place (formerly Browns Alley) located off Little Collins St, between Swanston and Elizabeth streets, was crowded with interested lunchtime "possums"for the launch on March 08, 2007.

Obituary

A master comedian who made an Australian housewife a global superstar
By Mark McGinness

Interviewed in 2006, Barry Humphries confessed: " If I die I hope it won't be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since The London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me.'' So, as luck would have it, Humphries died in Australia's other city. It was one that he had great affection for in his last decades, but when his daughter once asked him: " What is a contradiction in terms?'' He shot back: " A Sydney socialite.''

Barry Humphries was simply the most original, outrageous, enduring entertainer in Australia's history. Author, actor, actress, librettist, poet, singer, commentator, interviewer, bibliophile, painter, dandy, iconoclast. The characters he has brought to full-blooded life cannot be equalled in their ability to enlighten, amuse, abuse.

He will always been known mostly as Dame Edna Everage, the Moonee Ponds housewife whom he brought to stages, television and cinema screens around the world, which for six decades she refused to leave. He also conjured other distinctly Australian characters like trade unionist Lance Boyle and underground filmmaker Martin Agrippa; but the most enduring, other than the relentless Dame, were the disgusting diplomat, Sir Les Patterson and the soporific , lovable suburban ghost, Sandy Stone.

He was once described as " the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin' ' and had a genius as a satirist not just in his scripts but a brilliant ability, on stage and in interview, to ad-lib . His early antics and performances were seen, in part, as a distraction from personal demons that led to alcoholism and three divorces, but these were largely put to rest when he gave up drinking in 1971.

According to Germaine Greer, who witnessed his early theatre in Melbourne, " Barry Humphries belongs in the company of the greatest clowns, men who can laugh in the teeth of the tragedy that is human life'' .

Born in Melbourne in 1934, John Barry Humphries was the first child of shy, dry Louisa (nee Brown) and confident , happy, generous Eric, a master builder. The childhood of " Sunny Sam'' , as they called him, was happy: Eric Humphries' prosperous business provided for his son's every whim in the new garden suburb of Camberwell, even as siblings Barbara, Christopher and Michael appeared.

Although typical of the time, the Humphries' conservatism, devotion to convention and middle-class between-the-wars snobbery brought out the iconoclast in the teenaged Barry. Melbourne Grammar School was not conducive to his aesthetic, but he managed to establish an art club and regularly won the poetry prize. When challenged by the headmaster about the length of his hair, he retorted, " There's one man in the chapel with hair longer than mine. His name is Jesus.''

Compulsory national service loomed after graduation. He ingeniously evaded Puckapunyal Camp's military training and kitchen duties by manoeuvring himself into concert preparations. As a scenic designer, he even secured a staff car and driver for a 250-kilometre round trip to Melbourne in search of a particular shade of pink.

Humphries began a Melbourne University arts-law degree in 1951, but dropped out after two years (in 2003 he was welcomed back to accept an honorary doctorate, not to be outdone, the Cambridge Union would confer an honorary doctorate on Les Patterson).

His university days were devoted to student theatre and mounting provocative exhibitions involving old shoes and raw meat; shocking the public with elaborate pranks, such as eating vomit - actually strategically deposited Heinz Russian salad. He did this on board a Qantas flight and was subsequently banned.

He smoked and drank heavily, grew his unconventionally long hair even longer, partied late, and horrified his parents.

During a theatrical tour of country Victoria, his most-loved character was born. A tour-bus distraction, Edna Everage was inspired by the worthy women at post-show receptions, and Louisa's what-will-the-neighbours-think narrowness and chilly humourless criticisms are laid bare inner son's memoirs.

His improvised comic creation made her stage debut in a 1955 Melbourne revue. Humphries' thenunprecedented lampoon of Australian suburbia's morals, mores, its prejudices and preoccupations struck a chordand Dame Edna became , a housewife " gigastar'' , a global celebrity.

In 1955, however, Humphries was still a struggling actor - and a struggling husband. He had impulsively married dancer Brenda Wright but his womanising and drinking soon led to separation.

Back in Melbourne, he recorded his first Sandy Stone monologue. Sandy - a combination of his Uncle Lewis and a childhood neighbour, Mr Whittle - described once as the dullest man on earth. Throwing himself ever more vigorously into Bohemia, he befriended the Blackmans, Boyds, Sunday Reed, and Clifton Pugh, who painted his portrait in 1958.

Humphries also met fellow actor Rosalind Tong, a former New Zealand Ballet dancer. After divorcing Brenda, he married Ros in April 1959, shortly before sailing to London, where their daughters Tessa (who became an actress) and Emily (an artist) were born in 1963 and 1965.

By 1960 he was playing Mr Sowerberry in the West End hit Oliver! and later Fagin in 1967 and 1997 London revivals.

His London circle of friends - British artists, aristocrats and fellow expats - was huge. But his chronic alcoholism and serial infidelity reduced him to crippling feelings of shame and he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

After 10 impossible years together, Ros decided to remain in Melbourne with their daughters while he returned to London. After some tragic falls from grace (including being found drunk and badly beaten by the road), he was treated in private hospital in Glen Iris and and he was at last, and forever, sober.

His career was a series of hits and misses during the 1970s. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) film , directed by his young friend Bruce Beresford, was a success; Britain enthusiastically embraced his solo shows, which now featured the red-faced , yellow-toothed , crimpeline-suited , grosslyendowed cultural attache, Sir Les Patterson.

It was not until the 1990s that the United States warmed to her. She became so popular that she had a Vanity Fair column and a recurring role on the popular television series Ally McBeal. On both sides of the Atlantic, Edna also hosted chat shows, interviewing (if that is the word) stars from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Sean Connery.

He had always been a bibliophile and his success funded an extensive collection of books.He also collected Victorian and fine art and also took up the brush himself.

In 1979 he married his third wife, Diane Milstead. They had two sons: Oscar, born in 1981, an art dealer and journalist; Rupert, born in 1982, a designer of video games. Their nine-year relationship ended bitterly and in 1990, he married finally and forever, actressplaywright Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet Sir Stephen Spender.

Honours were heaped upon himbut he was never knighted.

Equally at home in England and Australia - and yet always askance about both - he continued to delight audiences until his dying breath. Having toured Australia with it in 2018, he toured the United Kingdom last year with his show The Man Behind the Mask, in which he - John Barry Humphries - was, for the first time, the principal character. He confessed, " It's the bravest thing I've ever done.''

Courageous, contagious, outrageous to the end

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❊ Web Links ❊

➼ Barry Humphries | Dame Edna Everage 

➼ www.dame-edna.com

➼ Dame Edna Everage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

❊ Also See... ❊

➼ Art: Barry Humphries - Dame Edna Everage

➼ World's Best Known Melburnian






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