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Oh, Possums, Dame Edna isn’t any extra.
To be unflinchingly exact, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comedian who for nearly seven a long time introduced that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.
His loss of life was confirmed by the hospital the place he had spent a number of days after present process hip surgical procedure. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Mr. Humphries as “an important wit, satirist, author and an absolute one-of-kind.”
A stiletto-heeled, stiletto-tongued persona who may nicely have been the spawn of a ménage à quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not a lot a personality as a cultural phenomenon, a pressure of nature trafficking in depraved, sequined commentary on the character of fame.
For generations after the day she first sprang to life on the Melbourne stage, Dame Edna reigned, bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, as one of many longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a collection of solo stage exhibits and was ubiquitous on tv in the US, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.
A grasp improviser (a lot of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs had been ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was broadly esteemed as one of many world’s foremost theatrical clowns.
“I’ve solely seen one man have energy over an viewers like that,” the theater critic John Lahr instructed him, after watching Dame Edna night time after night time in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the good stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.
Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” in any case, is Australian for “common.”
Housewife, Celebrity, Nationwide Treasure
However Edna quickly turned a case examine in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of superstar, and buying a damehood alongside the best way. A “housewife-superstar,” she known as herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, nonetheless later, to “gigastar.”
In Britain, the place Mr. Humphries had lengthy made his dwelling, Dame Edna was thought of a nationwide treasure, a paragon of efficiency artwork lengthy earlier than the time period was coined.
In the US, she starred in a three-episode collection, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock superstar discuss present broadcast on NBC within the early Nineteen Nineties, and was a frequent visitor on precise discuss exhibits.
She carried out a number of instances on Broadway, profitable Mr. Humphries a particular Tony Award, in addition to Drama Desk and Theater World Awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person present.
In her stage and TV exhibits, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna usually made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was greater than six toes tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a pure wisteria,” she appreciated to say), her night robe slit to the thigh to disclose Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her physique awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furnishings,” she known as them).
Addressing the viewers, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”
By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna known as viewers members “possums” usually. She additionally known as them different issues, as when, leaning throughout the footlights, she would handle a girl within the entrance row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I do know, pricey. I used to make my very own garments, too.”
Performances concluded with Dame Edna flinging a whole bunch of gladioli into the gang, no imply feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, Possums!” she exhorted viewers members who caught them, and the night would finish, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.
Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences had been handled to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to discovering oneself stranded in a corridor of self-importance mirrors.
There was commentary on her husband and kids (“I decided: I put my household final”); her magnificence routine (“Good vanity is essential. I look within the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you might be attractive, attractive, attractive’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, amongst them Queen Elizabeth II and her household. (“I’ve needed to change my phone quantity a number of instances to cease them ringing me.”)
Dame Edna’s TV exhibits had been usually graced by precise superstar company, together with Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.
They got here in for no much less of a drubbing than the viewers did, beginning with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense identify tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the sunshine of gigastardom so shut at hand, who amongst us wouldn’t be diminished to anonymity?
“Chuck,” Mr. Heston’s identify tag learn. Ms. Gabor obtained two: a “Zsa” for the fitting shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.
A couple of pleasantries had been exchanged earlier than Dame Edna moved in for the kill.
“You’ve had 9 hits this 12 months,” she purred fawningly on the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on one in all her British TV exhibits. “In your web site.”
Turning to the viewers after delivering a very toxic insult, she would ooze, “I imply that in essentially the most caring method.”
These company who emerged comparatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face worth and work together together with her as if she had been actual. The second he donned these rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries usually mentioned, Dame Edna turned actual to him too, a completely separate regulation unto herself.
‘I Want I’d Considered That’
“I’m, because it had been, within the wings, and she or he’s onstage,” he defined in a 2015 interview with Australian tv. “And once in a while she says one thing extraordinarily humorous, and I stand there and suppose, ‘I want I’d considered that.’”
However the really humorous factor, Possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first introduced Dame Edna to life, he supposed her to final solely per week or so. What was extra, she was meant to have been performed by the distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.
Mr. Humphries created a string of different characters over time, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. Nevertheless it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the general public totally — although in later years, her mortification-inducing traces generally landed her, and her creator, in hassle.
So absolutely did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to level out that he was neither a feminine impersonator within the typical sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.
“Mr. Humphries, do you ever need to take your kids apart and clarify to them why you wish to put on girls’s garments?” an American interviewer as soon as requested him.
“If I had been an actor enjoying Hamlet,” he replied, “would I’ve to take my kids apart and say I wasn’t actually Danish?’”
By all accounts way more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an completed painter, bibliophile and artwork collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, all the time spoke of her within the third individual.
She did likewise. “My supervisor,” she disdainfully known as him. (She additionally known as Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it should be mentioned, money an important a lot of her checks.)
However as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his help when he very seemingly wanted her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and at the very least one brush with the regulation.
‘I Hated Her’
John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a affluent builder; his mom, Louisa, was a homemaker.
From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a extra unique suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his dad and mom and their circle, and depressed by his mom’s chilly suburban propriety.
Dame Edna was a response to these forces.
“I invented Edna as a result of I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s e book “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the requirements of the little individuals of their era.”
Dame Edna emerged when the younger Mr. Humphries, below the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory firm based mostly on the College of Melbourne; he had dropped out of the college two years earlier than.
On lengthy bus excursions, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna Could Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, someday within the Thirties — an odd housewife who had discovered sudden acclaim after profitable a nationwide competitors, the Pretty Mom Quest.
Unthinkable because it appears, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. However she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that may be an indicator of her later self.
For a revue by the corporate in December 1955, Mr. Humphries wrote an element for Edna, earmarked for Ms. Caldwell, an Australian up to date. However when she proved too busy to oblige, he donned a costume and performed it himself. After Edna proved a success with Melbourne audiences, he carried out the character elsewhere within the nation.
By the tip of the Nineteen Fifties, hoping to make a profession as a critical actor, Mr. Humphries had moved to London, the place Edna met with little enthusiasm and was largely shelved. (She blamed Mr. Humphries ever after for her lack of early success there.)
Mr. Humphries performed Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, within the unique West Finish manufacturing of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the function when the present got here to Broadway in 1963.
However although he labored steadily in the course of the ’60s, he was additionally within the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later mentioned, had been of no avail.
His nadir got here in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to search out himself below arrest.
With a health care provider’s assist, Mr. Humphries turned sober quickly afterward; he didn’t take a drink for the remainder of his life. He dusted off Dame Edna and, little by little, de-dowdified her. By the late ’70s, with superstar tradition in full throttle, she had given him worldwide renown and unremitting employment.
Edna didn’t seduce each critic. Reviewing her first New York stage present, the Off Broadway manufacturing “Housewife! Celebrity!!,” in The New York Occasions in 1977, Richard Eder known as it “abysmal.”
Nor did Edna’s resolute lack of political correctness all the time stand her, or Mr. Humphries, in good stead. In February 2003, writing an recommendation column as Dame Edna in Vainness Truthful, he replied to a reader’s question about whether or not to be taught Spanish.
“Who speaks it that you’re actually determined to speak to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response learn. “The assistance? Your leaf blower? Research French or German, the place there are at the very least a couple of books price studying, or, when you’re American, strive English.”
A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the journal’s cowl that month. Vainness Truthful discontinued Dame Edna’s column not lengthy afterward.
In an interview with The Occasions in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.
“The individuals I offended had been minorities with no humorousness, I concern,” he mentioned. “When you must clarify the character of satire to any person, you’re combating a shedding battle.”
Mr. Humphries drew additional ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph through which he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the identical interview, he described individuals who transition from male to feminine as “mutilated” males, and Caitlyn Jenner particularly as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”
Crusing Above the Fray
Dame Edna, for her half, appeared to sail imperviously by way of. She returned to Broadway in 2004 for the well-received present “Dame Edna: Again With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with “All About Me,” a revue that additionally starred the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein.
As herself — it was she, and never Mr. Humphries, who was credited — Dame Edna performed the recurring character Claire Otoms (the identify is an anagram for “a sitcom function”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV collection “Ally McBeal.”
Beneath his personal identify, Mr. Humphries appeared because the Nice Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Sudden Journey” (2012); because the voice of Bruce, the good white shark, in “Discovering Nemo” (2003); and in different footage.
Mr. Humphries’s books embrace the memoirs “Extra Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Ladies within the Background” (1995). He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 2007.
Dame Edna additionally wrote a number of books, amongst them “Dame Edna’s Bedside Companion” (1983) and the memoir “My Attractive Life” (1989).
Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, resulted in divorce, as did his second, to Rosalind Tong, and his third, to Diane Millstead. He had two daughters, Tessa and Emily, from his marriage to Ms. Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Ms. Millstead.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors embrace his spouse of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the British poet Stephen Spender, in addition to his kids and 10 grandchildren.
Mr. Humphries continued to carry out till final 12 months, when he toured Britain (as himself) with a one-man present, “The Man Behind the Masks.” He returned to Australia in December for Christmas.
Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a persistent invalid “whose prostate,” she usually lamented, “has been hanging over me for years,” died way back. Her survivors embrace an adored son, Kenny, who designed all her robes; a much less adored son, Bruce; and a despised daughter, the wayward Valmai. (“She steals issues. Places them in her pantyhose. Notably frozen chickens when she’s in a grocery store.”)
One other daughter, Lois, was kidnapped as an toddler by a “rogue koala,” a topic Dame Edna might deliver herself to debate with interviewers solely not often.
Although the kid was by no means seen once more, to the tip of her life Dame Edna by no means gave up hope she can be discovered.
“I’m wanting,” she instructed NPR in 2015. “Each time I cross a eucalyptus tree I search for.”
Fixed Meheut contributed reporting.
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