Oh, Possums, Dame Edna is not any extra.
To be unflinchingly exact, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comedian who for nearly seven many years introduced that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful Dadaist life, died on Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.
His demise 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 “a great wit, satirist, writer 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, one of many longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a sequence of solo stage exhibits and was ubiquitous on tv within the United States, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.
A grasp improviser (lots of Dame Edna’s most stinging barbs have been ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was broadly esteemed as one of many world’s foremost theatrical clowns.
“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” the theater critic John Lahr informed him, after watching Dame Edna evening after evening in London. “My father.” Mr. Lahr’s father was the nice stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.
Mr. Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” in spite of everything, is Australian for “average.”
Housewife, Superstar, National Treasure
But Edna quickly turned a case research in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness and the cult of movie star, and buying a damehood alongside the best way. A “housewife-superstar,” she referred to 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-about a nationwide treasure, a paragon of efficiency artwork lengthy earlier than the time period was coined.
In the United States, she starred in a three-episode sequence, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock movie star speak present broadcast on NBC within the early Nineteen Nineties, and was a frequent visitor on precise speak exhibits.
She carried out a number of occasions 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 sometimes 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 natural 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 furniture,” she referred to as them).
Addressing the viewers, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, Possums!”
By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna referred to as viewers members “possums” usually. She additionally referred to as them different issues, as when, leaning throughout the footlights, she would tackle a girl within the entrance row in a confiding, carrying voice: “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”
Performances concluded with Dame Edna flinging a whole lot 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 have 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 youngsters (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her magnificence routine (“Good self-esteem is very important. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Edna, you are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous’”); and the constellation of luminaries who routinely sought her counsel, amongst them Queen Elizabeth II and her household. (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me.”)
Dame Edna’s TV exhibits have been usually graced by precise movie star visitors, 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 title 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 title tag learn. Ms. Gabor obtained two: a “Zsa” for the appropriate shoulder and a “Zsa” for the left.
A couple of pleasantries have been exchanged earlier than Dame Edna moved in for the kill.
“You’ve had nine hits this year,” she purred fawningly on the singer-songwriter Michael Bolton on certainly one of her British TV exhibits. “On your website.”
Turning to the viewers after delivering a very toxic insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”
Those visitors who emerged comparatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face worth and work together together with her as if she have been actual. The second he donned these rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries usually mentioned, Dame Edna turned actual to him too, a wholly separate regulation unto herself.
‘I Wish I’d Thought of That’
“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” he defined in a 2015 interview with Australian tv. “And every now and then she says something extremely funny, and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”
But the actually 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 through the years, notably the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the general public completely — although in later years, her mortification-inducing traces generally landed her, and her creator, in bother.
So totally did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to level out that he was neither a feminine impersonator within the standard sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.
“Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?,” an American interviewer as soon as requested him.
“If I were an actor playing Hamlet,” he replied, “would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish?’”
By all accounts much more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an achieved 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 manager,” she disdainfully referred to as him. (She additionally referred to as Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it should be mentioned, money an excellent lots of her checks.)
But as dismissive of her creator as Dame Edna was, she rallied to his assist when he very seemingly wanted her most: after years of alcoholism culminated in stays in psychiatric hospitals and no less than 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 mother and father and their circle, and depressed by his mom’s chilly suburban propriety.
Dame Edna was a response to these forces.
“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Mr. Lahr’s ebook “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage With Barry Humphries” (1992). “I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation.”
Dame Edna emerged when the younger Mr. Humphries, underneath the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory firm based mostly on the University 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 May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, someday within the Nineteen Thirties — an atypical housewife who had discovered sudden acclaim after profitable a nationwide competitors, the Lovely Mother Quest.
Unthinkable because it appears, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But 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. But 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 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 End manufacturing of the musical “Oliver!” in 1960, and reprised the function when the present got here to Broadway in 1963.
But although he labored steadily throughout the ’60s, he was additionally within the fierce grip of alcoholism. Stays in psychiatric hospitals, he later mentioned, have been of no avail.
His nadir got here in 1970, when he awoke in a Melbourne gutter to search out himself underneath 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 movie star 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! Superstar!!,” in The New York Times in 1977, Richard Eder referred to 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 Vanity Fair, he replied to a reader’s question about whether or not to study Spanish.
“Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna’s characteristically caustic response learn. “The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or, if you’re American, try English.”
A public furor ensued, led by the Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek, who appeared on the journal’s cowl that month. Vanity Fair discontinued Dame Edna’s column not lengthy afterward.
In an interview with The Times in 2004, Mr. Humphries was unrepentant.
“The people I offended were minorities with no sense of humor, I fear,” he mentioned. “When you have to explain the nature of satire to somebody, you’re fighting a losing battle.”
Mr. Humphries drew additional ire after a 2016 interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph wherein he denounced political correctness as a “new puritanism.” In the identical interview, he described males who transition to feminine as “mutilated” males, and Caitlyn Jenner particularly as “a publicity-seeking ratbag.”
Sailing 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: Back 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 title is an anagram for “a sitcom role”), an outré lawyer, on the Fox TV sequence “Ally McBeal.”
Under his personal title, Mr. Humphries appeared because the Great Goblin in “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012); because the voice of Bruce, the nice white shark, in “Finding Nemo” (2003); and in different photos.
Mr. Humphries’s books embrace the memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002) and the novel “Women in 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 Gorgeous 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 had returned to Australia late final yr for Christmas.
Dame Edna’s husband, Norm, a continual 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 things. Puts them in her pantyhose. Particularly frozen chickens when she’s in a supermarket.”)
Another daughter, Lois, was kidnapped as an toddler by a “rogue koala,” a topic Dame Edna may deliver herself to debate with interviewers solely not often.
Though 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 looking,” she informed NPR in 2015. “Every time I pass a eucalyptus tree I look up.”
Constant Meheut contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com