February 10, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Barry Humphries, Australian satirist and creator of Dame Edna Everage, is 75
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, February 10, Graphic News: The spangly spectacles, blue rinse hairdo and catchphrase greeting: "Hello Possums!", could only belong to Barry Humphries' suburban housewife-turned-international-megastar, Edna Everage. Currently midway through a tour of North America, more than five decades since her first incarnation, Humphries' most famous alter ego was dreamed up on a bus when the 20-year-old Melbourne hopeful was touring rural Victoria in a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Like one of the bard's bawdy mistresses, Dame Edna -- she was "knighted" by then-Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, during a show in 1974 -- is biting satire, poking fun at her audience, mixing laughter with discomfort in the grand tradition of caricature. Humphries has always steered clear of drag, creating instead a completely separate persona. He is reported to dislike intensely a sculpture, recently unveiled in his home town and intended to honour him, because it depicts him in women's clothing, with his own, unmade-up face.
 
Yet it was the dressing-up box of his childhood -- he was the only son of comfortably well-off parents, his father a manager in the construction industry -- which sparked his imagination. Entertaining people became an early gift. "Making people laugh was a very good way of befriending them", Humphries recalls in the first volume of his award-winning autobiography, More Please. "People couldn't hit you if they were laughing". As a teenager, he began to react against the conventional, middle-class values of his family and, to their dismay, concentrated on the Arts, particularly the strange, new Dadaist movement, which he studied, along with Law and Philosophy, at Melbourne University. His student days established in Humphries a lifelong love of revue, which has proved the mainstay of his hugely successful and lengthy career. Along with Edna have come the likes of Sir Les Patterson, the repulsive Aussie cultural attache; Edna's nephew, Barry McKenzie, originally a strip cartoon character for Private Eye, with his wide vocabulary of Australian slang; and the rambling, elderly Sandy Stone.
 
A close friend of the late Peter Cook, Humphries first met the British comedian after moving to London in 1959, and made his film debut with Cook, and partner Dudley Moore, in Bedazzled, in 1967. Spike Milligan gave him roles in a host of stage and radio productions, among them The Bed Sitting Room, while composer Lionel Bart cast him as the undertaker Sowerberry in the original London stage version of Oliver! in 1960. Humphries went on to play the musical's arch villain, Fagin, twice -- in 1967 at the Piccadilly Theatre and 30 years later in Cameron Mackintosh's revival at the London Palladium. His television shows during the 1980s, particularly The Dame Edna Experience, in which celebrities such as Liza Minnelli and Robin Williams were given the chat-show treatment, brought Humphries' creation a cult following, which still sees sell-out audiences for his one-man shows. The only person to appear on stage with him -- as Edna's long-suffering friend and bridesmaid, Madge -- was actress Emily Perry, who died in February 2008 at the age of 100.
 
Married four times, Humphries is the father of two girls -- one a painter, the other an actress -- and two boys, one of whom -- his journalist son, Oscar -- survived an overdose on Christmas Day, 2002.  Humphries himself has been teetotal for many years following a battle with alcoholism which saw him treated in hospital when he returned to Australia in the early 70s. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2007 for services to entertainment.
/ENDS