Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Barry Humphries (b. 17 February 1934) is an
Australian comedian, satirist and character actor
best known for his on-stage and television alter
egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife, and
Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed
cultural attaché to United Kingdom|Britain.
Humphries is also a film producer and script
writer, a star of London's West End musical
theatre, an "award-winning" author and an
accomplished landscape painter.

Barry Humphries was born in Melbourne. After
education at Melbourne Grammar School and the
University of Melbourne he joined the Melbourne
Theatre Group, and created the character of Edna
Everage in 1956. In the early sixties he moved to
London and appeared in several West End
productions. He first brought Mrs. Everage to the
British stage in 1969 for his one-man show Just a
Show.

Humphries' characters, especially Dame Edna
Everage|Edna Everage, have brought him
international renown, and he has appeared in
numerous films, stage productions and television
shows.
His Barry McKenzie comic strips about Australians
in London appeared in Private Eye magazine with
drawings by Nicholas Garland.  The stories about
"Bazza" (also Humphries' nickname) gave wide
circulation to Australian slang, particularly
jokes about drinking and its consequences, much of
it invented by Humphries.  
He was also the voice of Bruce the Shark in the
2003 Pixar movie Finding Nemo.

Humphries has been married four times; his fourth
wife Lizzie Spender is the daughter of British
poet Sir Stephen Spender. He has two sons and two
daughters from his third and fourth marriages to
Diane Millstead and Lizzie Spender.

==Early life==

Barry Humphries was born in Kew, Melbourne. His
father was a well-to-do construction manager and
Barry grew up in a "clean, tasteful and modern
home" in Camberwell, then one of Melbourne’s new
‘garden suburbs’. His early home life set the
pattern for his eventual stage career -- Barry's
parents bought him everything he wanted, but his
father in particular spent little time with him,
so he spent hours playing dress-ups in the back
garden.

"Disguising myself as different characters and I
had a whole box of dressing up clothes ... Red
Indian, sailor suit, Chinese costume and I was
very spoiled in that way ... I also found that
entertaining people gave me a great feeling of
release, making people laugh was a very good way
of befriending them. People couldn't hit you could
they if they were laughing."

His parents nicknamed him 'Sunny Sam', and his
early childhood was happy and uneventful, but in
his teens Barry began to rebel against the
strictures of conventional suburban life by
becoming 'artistic' – much to the dismay of his
parents who, despite their affluence, distrusted
"art". A key event took place when he was nine --
his mother gave all his books to the Salvation
Army, cheerfully explaining: "But you've read
them, Barry."

Humphries responded by becoming a voracious
reader, a collector of rare books, a painter, a
theatre fan and a surrealist. Dressing up in a
black cloak, black homburg and mascara'd eyes, he
invented his first sustained character,  "Dr Aaron
Azimuth", dandy and Dadaist.

His father’s building business prospered, and
Barry was sent to Melbourne Grammar School, where
he spurned sport, detested mathematics, shirked
cadets "on the basis of conscientious objection"
and matriculated with brilliant results in English
and Art. 

He spent two years at Melbourne University, where
he studied law, philosophy and fine arts. During
this time he became Australia’s leading exponent
of the deconstructive and absurd art movement,
Dada. The Dadaist pranks and performances he
mounted in Melbourne were experiments in anarchy
and visual satire which have become part of
Australian folklore. One famous exhibit entitled
"Pus In Boots" consisted of a pair of Wellington
boots filled with custard. 

He was also legendary for his provocative public
pranks. One infamous example involved Humphries
dressing as a Frenchman, with an accomplice
dressed as a blind person; the accomplice would
board a tram, followed soon after by Humprhries.
At the appropriate juncture, Humphries would force
his way past the "blind" man, yelling "Get out of
my way, you disgusting blind person", kicking him
viciously in the shins and then jumping off the
tram and making his escape in a waiting car. 

An even more extreme example was his notorious
"sick bag" prank. This involved carrying a tin of
condensed soup onto an aircraft, which he would
then surreptitiously empty into an air-sickness
bag. At the appropriate point in the flight, he
would pretend to vomit loudly and violently into
the bag. Then, to the horror of passengers and
crew, he would proceed to eat the contents. Such
stunts were the early manifestations of a lifelong
interest in the bizarre, discomfiting and
subversive.

He had written and performed songs and sketches in
university revues, so after leaving university he
joined the newly formed Melbourne Theatre Company.
It was at this point that he created the first
incarnation of what became his most famous
character, Dame Edna Everage|Edna Everage. The
first stage sketch featuring Mrs Norm Everage,
called "Olympic Hostess", premiered at Melbourne
University's Union Theatre on December 12, 1955.
In his award-winning autobiography More Please
(1992) Humphries relates that he created a
character similar to Edna in the back of a bus
while touring country Victoria in Twelfth Night
with the MTC at the age of twenty. The dowdy
Moonee Ponds housewife, originally created as a
caricature of Australian suburban complacency and
insularity, has evolved over four decades to
become a satire of stardom, the gaudily dressed,
acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally feted
Housewife Megastar, Dame Edna Everage.

Humphries' other satirical characters include the
legendary comic strip hero, nephew of Dame Edna
(and progenitor of Crocodile Dundee) Barry
McKenzie; the "priapic and inebriated cultural
attaché" Sir Les Patterson, who has "continued to
bring worldwide discredit upon Australian arts and
culture, while contributing as much to the
Australian vernacular as he has borrowed from it";
gentle, grandfatherly "returned gentleman" Sandy
Stone; iconoclastic '60s underground film-maker
Martin Agrippa, Paddington socialist academic Neil
Singleton, sleazy trade union official Lance
Boyle, high-pressure art salesman Morrie
O’Connor and failed tycoon Owen Steele.

Humphries then moved to Sydney and joined Sydney's
famous Philip Street Revue Theatre, Australia's
leading venue for revue and satirical comedy.
After a long season in revue, he appeared as
Estragon in Waiting for Godot, Australia's first
ever production of a Samuel Beckett play.

==London and the 1960s==

In 1959 Humphries, now in his early twenties,
sailed to Venice and then settled in London where
he lived and worked throughout the Sixties. He
became friends with leading members of the British
comedy scene including Dudley Moore, Peter Cook,
Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Spike Milligan,
Dick Bentley, Willie Rushton and fellow Aussie
expatriate comedian-actor John Bluthal. Humphries
performed at Cook's comedy venue The Establishment
Club, where he also became friends with and was
photographed by leading photographer Lewis Morley,
whose studio was located above the club. He
contributed to the satirical magazine Private Eye,
of which Cook was publisher, his most famous work
being the famous cartoon strip The Wonderful World
of Barry McKenzie. The bawdy cartoon satire of the
worst aspects of Australians abroad was written by
Humphries and drawn by New Zealand born cartoonist
Nicholas Garland. The book version of the comic
strip, published in the late' 60s, was for some
time banned in Australia.

Humphries appeared in numerous West End stage
productions including the musicals Oliver! and
Maggie May, by Lionel Bart, and stage and radio
productions by his friend Spike Milligan, in
particular The Bed Sitting Room. 

Humphries' first major break on the British stage
came when he was cast in the role of the
undertaker Mr Sowerberry for the original 1960
London stage production of Oliver! He recorded
Sowerberry's feature number "That's Your Funeral"
for the original London cast soundtrack album
(released on Deram) and reprised the role when the
production moved to Broadway in 1963, where it
became the first London stage musical to be
transplanted to Broadway and receive the same
critical and audience reception it had received in
Britain. In 1967 he starred as Fagin in the
Piccadilly Theatre's revival of Oliver! which
featured a young Phil Collins as The Artful
Dodger. In 1997 Barry reprised the role of Fagin
in Cameron Mackintosh's award winning revival at
the London Palladium. 

In 1967 his friendship with Cook and Moore led to
his first film role, a cameo as "Envy" in the hit
film Bedazzled (1967 movie)|Bedazzled starring
Cook and Moore with Eleanor Bron, and directed by
Stanley Donen. The following year he appeared in
The Bliss Of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine. 

In the late '60s Humphries contributed to BBC-TV's
popular The Late Show (which also featured Oz
magazine editor Richard Neville) but Humphries
found his true calling with his one-man satirical
stage revues, in which he performed as Edna
Everage and other character creations including
Les Patterson and Sandy Stone. He gained
considerable notoriety with his first one-man
revue Just A Show at London's Fortune Theatre in
1969. It polarized British critics but was
successful enough to lead to a short-lived BBC
television series The Barry Humphries Scandals,
one of the precursors to the famous Monty Python
series.

==1970s==

In 1970 Barry returned to Australia, where Edna
Everage made her movie debut in John B. Murray's
The Naked Bunyip. In 1971-72 he teamed up with
producer Philip Adams and writer-director Bruce
Beresford to create a film version of the Barry
McKenzie cartoons. The Adventures of Barry
MacKenzie starred singer Barry Crocker in the
title role and featured Humphries -- who co-wrote
the script with Beresford -- playing three
different parts. It was filmed in England and
Australia with an all-star cast including Spike
Milligan, Peter Cook, Dennis Price, Dick Bentley,
Willie Rushton, Julie Covington, Clive James and
broadcaster Joan Bakewell. Like several other
films of the time which have since been
categorised as belonging to the Ocker genre of
Australian film, it was almost unanimously panned
by Australian film critics, but became a huge hit
with audiences. In fact, the film became the most
successful locally-made feature ever released in
Australia up to that time, paving the way for the
success of subsequent locally made feature films
like Alvin Purple and Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Although his career was blossoming, throughout his
sojourn in London Humphries had become
increasingly dependent on alcohol and by the late
Sixties his friends and family began to fear that
his addiction might cost him his career and
possibly even his life. It was undoubtedly one of
the main reasons for the failure of his first
marriage, and his drinking was also a contributing
factor to the collapse of his second. His drinking
reached crisis point during a visit home in the
early Seventies -- his parents finally had him
admitted to a private hospital to 'dry out' when,
after a particularly heavy binge, he was found
unconscious in a gutter. Since then he has
abstained from alcohol completely and was one of
the many friends who tried vainly to help Peter
Cook, who eventually died from alcohol-related
illnesses. It has been speculated that the
excesses of the perpetually drunk Sir Les
Patterson are to some extent informed by his own
battles with the bottle.

==Film roles==

Since the late '60s Humphries has appeared in
numerous films, mostly in supporting or cameo
roles. His credits include the UK sex comedy
Percy's Progress (1974), David Baker's The Great
McCarthy and Bruce Beresford's Barry MacKenzie
Holds his Own (1974) -- in which Edna was made a
Dame by then Australian PM Gough Whitlam. 

Other film credits inlclude Side By Side
(film)|Side By Side (1975) and The Getting Of
Widsom (film)|The Getting Of Widsom (1977). The
same year, he had a cameo as Edna in the Robert
Stigwood musical film Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band (film)|Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band (which became infamous as one of the biggest
film flops of the decade), followed in 1981 by a
part in Shock Treatment (film)|Shock Treatment,
the unsuccessful sequel to The Rocky Horror
Picture Show. 

He was more successful with his featured role as
Richard Deane in Dr Fischer of Geneva (1985); this
 was followed by The Howling III (1987), a cameo
as Rupert Murdoch in the miniseries Selling 
Hitler (1991) with Alexei Sayle, a three-role
cameo in Phillipe Mora's horror satire Pterodactyl
Woman From Beverly Hills (1994), the role of Count
Metternich in Immortal Beloved (1994), as well as
roles in The Leading Man (1996), the Spice Girls'
film Spice World, the Australian feature Welcome
To Woop  Woop (1997) and most recently Nicholas
Nickelby (film)|Nicholas Nickelby (2002). 

Barry has also featured in various roles in comedy
performance films including The Secret 
Policeman's' Other Ball (1982) and A Night of
Comic Relief 2 (1989). In 1987 he starred as Les
Patterson in one of his own rare flops, the
disastrous Les Patterson Saves the World, directed
by George  Miller of Mad Max fame and co-written
by Humphries with his third wife, Diane Millstead.

==One-man shows==

Humphries' forté has always been his one-man
satirical stage revues, in which he appears as
Edna Everage and a host of other character
creations, including Les Patterson and Sandy
Stone. There can be few (if any) comedians who can
boast the career longevity he has enjoyed with
Dame Edna, whose popularity shows no signs of
flagging after more than forty years. Humphries'
success is also a tribute to the tremendous skill,
style and insight -- and the sheer hard work --
that he invests in performing two-and-a-half hour
shows of entirely original material, laced with
ad-libbing, improvisation and the famous audience
participation segments.

Humphries has had many successful stage
productions in London, most of which he
subsequently toured internationally. Despite his
later popularity, he encountered stiff resistance
in the early years of his career -- his first
London one-man show A Nice Night's Entertainment
(1962) received scathing reviews and it was
several years before he made a second attempt. He
gained considerable notoriety with his next 
one-man revue Just A Show, staged at London's
Fortune Theatre in 1969. It polarized the critics
but was a hit with audiences and became the basis
of a growing cult following in the UK. He
continued to gain popularity with his early '70s
shows including A Load Of Olde Stuffe (1971) and
At Least You Can Say That You've Seen It
(1974-75).

He finally broke through to widespread critical
and audience acclaim in Britain with his 1976
London production Housewife, Superstar! at the
Apollo Theatre. Its success in Britain and
Australia led Humphries to try his luck with the
show in New York in 1977, but it proved to be a
disastrous repeat of his experience with Just A
Show. Humphries later summed up his negative
reception by saying: "When the New York Times
tells you to close, you close."

His next show was Isn't It Pathetic At His Age
(1978). Like many of his shows, the title quotes
one of the remarks his mother often made when she
took Barry to the theatre to see superannuated
overseas actors touring in Australia during his
youth. 

His subsequent one-man shows include:

* A Night With Dame Edna (1979), which won the
Society of West End Theatres Award
* An Evening's Intercourse With Dame Edna (1982)
* Three seasons of Back with a Vengeance
(1987-1988, 2005)
* Look at Me When I'm Talking to You (1996)
* Edna, The Spectacle (1998) at the Haymarket
Theatre|Theatre Royal Haymarket, where he holds
the record as the only solo act to fill the
theatre since it opened in 1663
* Remember You're Out which toured Australia in
1999. 

He has made numerous theatrical tours in Germany,
Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and in the Far and
Middle East. In 2003 he toured Australia with his
latest show, Getting Back To My Roots (And Other
Suckers).

==Dame Edna==
Main article: Dame Edna Everage

Edna Everage is undoubtedly one of the most famous
and enduring Australian comic characters of all
time,and one of the longest-lived comedic
characerisations ever devised. Originally
conceived in the late 1950s, Edna has long since
transcended her modest origins as a satire of
Australian suburbia to become one of the most
successful, best-known and best loved comedy
characters of all time. She has grown over the
years to become, as journalist Caroline Overington
puts it:

"... a perfect parody of a modern, vainglorious
celebrity with a rampant ego and a strong aversion
to the audience (whom celebrities pretend to love
but actually, as Edna so boldly makes transparent,
they actually loathe for their cheap shoes and
suburban values). (The Sydney Morning Herald)

Like her ever-present bunches of gladioli, one of
the most popular and distinctive features of
Edna's stage and TV appearances has been her
extravagant wardrobe, with gaudy, custom-made
gowns that  satiricaly outdo the most outrageous
creations of Hollywood showbiz designers such as
Bob Mackie. Her costumes, most of which were
created for her by Australian designer Bill
Goodwin, routinely incorporate Aussie kitsch icons
such as the flag, Australian native animals and
flowers, the Sydney Opera House and the boxing
kangaroo. 

As the character evolved, Edna's always unseen
family became an integral part of the satire,
particularly the travails of her invalid husband
Norm, who suffered from an almost lifelong
onslaught of an unspecified prostate ailment. Her
daughter Valmai and her gay, window-dresser son
Kenny also became intrinsic elements of the act,
as did her long-suffering best friend and
bridesmaid, Madge Allsop. 

Throughout Edna's career, Madge has been played by
New Zealand-born actress Emily Perry, now aged in
her 80s, who has the distinction of being the only
other actor ever to appear on stage with Humphries
in his stage shows, as well as making regular
appearances in Dame Edna's TV programs.

Dame Edna is also notable as one of the only
satirical characters to make a successful
transition from stage to TV without losing
popularity in either genre, and her decades-long
popularity shows no signs of waning. The talk show
format provided a perfect outlet for Humphries'
rapier wit and his legendary ability to ad-lib,
and it enabled Edna to draw on a wide and
appreciative pool of fans among fellow actors and
comedians, with scores of top-rank stars lining up
to be lampooned on her shows. As other Australian
actors have begun to make a wider impression in
international film and television, Edna has not
hesitated to reveal that it was her mentorship
which helped "kiddies" like "little Nicole Kidman"
to achieve their early success.

==Television roles==

Humphries' numerous television appearances in
Australia, the UK and the USA include The Bunyip
(TV show)|The Bunyip, a children's comedy for
Channel 7 in Melbourne. IN the UK he made two
highly successful series of his talk show The Dame
Edna Experience (TV show)|The Dame Edna Experience
for London Weekend Television. The series boasted
a phalanx of superstar guests including Liza
Minnelli, Robin Williams, Cher (entertainer)|Cher,
Roger Moore, Charlton Heston and Kim Basinger.
These enormously popular programs have since been
repeated worldwide and the special A Night On
Mount Edna won Humphries the Golden Rose of
Montreux in 1991. He wrote and starred in ABC-TV's
The Life And Death Of Sandy Stone (1991) and
presented the ABC social history series Barry
Humphries' Flashbacks in 1999.

His more recent television shows include Dame
Edna's Neighbourhood Watch, Dame Edna's Work
Experience and Dame Edna's Hollywood, an
occasional series filmed in the U.S. for the NBC
and the Fox network. Edna's most recent television
special was Dame Edna Kisses It Better.

==Success in the United States==

Barry Humphries finally realised his long-delayed
dream of success in the United States when he took
Dame Edna - The Royal Tour to Broadway in 2000,
scoring a smash hit and winning rave reviews. As a
result Humphries won the inaugural 'Special Tony
Award for a Live Theatrical Event' in 2000 and two
National Broadway Theatre Awards for "Best Play"
and for "Best Actor" in 2001. 

Edna's new-found success in America led to many
media opportunities, including a cameo appearance
in the hit TV series Ally McBeal. Vanity Fair
magazine then invited Dame Edna to write a
satirical advice column but she unwittingly
created a storm of controversy with a piece
published in the February 2003 issue. Replying to
a reader who asked if she should learn Spanish
language|Spanish, she replied: 

"Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language
worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick
listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take
care of that ... Who speaks it that you are really
desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower?"


Edna's satirical intent -- poking fun at the
haughty attitudes of wealthy Americans who hire
low-waged Hispanic domestic workers -- evidently
went over the heads of some readers. Many who
subsequently complained appeared not to realise
that Dame Edna was merely a character and that
'she' was not really a woman. Members of the
Hispanic community took joke out of context,
reading it as a deliberately racist remark, and
complaints flooded in to the magazine. Hollywood
actress Selma Hayek responded angrily, penning a
furious letter in which she denounced Dame Edna.
Death threats were even received and Vanity Fair
was eventually forced to publish a full-page
apology to the Hispanic community. 

Humphries commented later. "If you have to explain
satire to someone, you might as well give up." 
When questioned about the controversy (as Dame
Edna) on the eve of her 2003 Australian tour, she
retorted that Hayek's denunciation was due to
"professional jealousy", and that Hayek was
envious because the role of painter Frida Kahlo
(for which Hayek received an Oscar nomination) had
originally been offered to Edna: 

"When I was offered the part of Frida I turned it
down, and she was the second choice. I said 'I'm
not playing the role of a woman with a moustache
and a monobrow, and I'm not having same-sex
relations on the screen' ... I'm not racist. I
love all races, particularly white people. You
know, I even like Roman Catholics."

==Other work==

Humphries is the author of eighteen books
including two autobiographies, two novels and a
treatise on Chinese drama in the goldfields. He
has also written several plays and has made dozens
of recordings. The first volume of his
autobiography More Please won the J.R. Ackerley
prize for biography in 1993. He was the subject of
two critical and biographical studies: The Real
Barry Humphries by Peter Coleman, and Dame Edna
Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization by
John Lahr. His second volume of autobiography, My
Life As Me, was published in late 2002.

== Awards ==
* 1982 - Order of Australia
* 1993 - J.R. Ackerley prize for his autobiography
More, Please
* 1994 - Honorary Doctorate at Griffith University
* 1997 - Sir Peter Ustinov Award for Comedy
presented at the Banff Television Festival
* 2000 - Special Tony Award for a live theatrical
event at the 55th Annual Tony Awards for Dame
Edna: The Royal Tour
* 2000 - Special Achievement Award by the Outer
Critics Circle for The Royal Tour
* 2000 - Best Play from the National Broadway
Theatre Awards for The Royal Tour
* 2003 - Honorary Doctorate of Law at his alma
mater, University of Melbourne

==External links==

*http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/b
arryhumphries/ Official Australian Cultural Site
on Humphries
*imdb name|id=0402032|name=Barry Humphries
*http://www.playbill.com/celebritybuzz/whoswho/bio
graphy/15125 Playbill Biography
*http://www.tonyawards.com/p/tonys_search?start=15
&year=2000&award=All&lname=&fname=&show= 2000 Tony
Award Listing
*http://www.nationalbroadwayawards.com National
Broadway Theatre Awards
*http://www.unimelb.edu.au/ExecServ/honcausa/citat
ion/humphries.html University of Melbourne
Doctorate announcement
*http://www.banff2005.com/ Banff Television