2023-04-22 18:23:49
The Queen was his biggest fan
Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage
Source: dpa
Everyone probably knows Dame Edna, the offbeat drag queen. Even Crown Prince William and Kate invited her to their wedding. Now her actor Barry Humphries has died. In his long life he has embodied so much more than his most famous role.
She celebrated the greeting formula “Hello, Possums!” and maintained an immediately recognizable look – purple water waves, shrill glasses from the ex-Elton John collection and even shriller, because outrageously colorful, never figure-hugging dresses: Dame Edna, the world’s oldest drag queen, born Down Under, long before “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”, at a time when people still said transvestite. In the real life of the performer, obviously heterosexual, married at least four times and blessed with four children.
Dame Eda was only a role
She was wickedly rude – and rudely polite at the same time. She was the court jester who was allowed to tell the unvarnished truth with lots of lipstick. Many of her jokes, such as the one about old ladies in the audience with much older clothes (“it’s nice that they at least pulled out the curtain rings”) would no longer be socially acceptable today. Nevertheless, Dame Edna was invited to the wedding of Crown Prince William and Kate Middleton. In full regalia, of course, because the Queen was considered a big fan.
Dame Edna was just one, the brightest side of Australian comedian Barry Humphries. He also slipped into a variety of other long-running roles, such as the perpetually turned on and perpetually horny Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural attaché at the London Embassy, and middle-of-the-road Aussie Sandy Stone.
He was also a film producer and scriptwriter, musical star, writer and landscape painter. But the fictional character Mrs. Everage, suburban Melbourne with a penchant for higher things: She made him a celebrity and he, the housewife, a gigastar.
Barry Humphries in 2007
What: AP
It was invented back in 1955, and its fame of made-up shamelessness slowly spread across the English-speaking world, and eventually to the rest of the globe as well. When Dame Edna gained a foothold on TV in Germany with her high heels, she was already of retirement age. But there were no wrinkles under the concrete make-up, and both the phenotype and the jokes were completely timeless. As a result, Dame Edna appeared as herself in films or TV series such as “Ally McBeal”, she was a show star guest, sat as her artificial self on talk shows; the real Barry barely stepped out of her glamorous shadow.
Dame Edna was actually stuffy, but also quite gaga and very queer. Nevertheless, no one could hate her, not even the targets of her nasty punch lines on the silver platter of cheerful composure. Because of her, the weird was suddenly normal, the man behind it in nylon stockings and with artificial fingernails, he was (similar to the popular TV tranny Mary, until she defoliated at the end of the show) simply repressed and forgotten. Although there was always the raspy voice of Barry Humphries, who even managed to voice actor without a lady’s outfit, for example as Hai Bruce in “Finding Nemo”. He was even animated to become the Great Goblin in Peter Jackson’s first The Hobbit.
She was on stage until 2013
Humphries, later showered with awards and honorary doctorates, was born on February 17, 1934 in Melbourne, and was nicknamed “Sunny Sam” during his childhood. But soon, out of rebellion against his conformist parents, he invented the first fictional character, Dr. Aaron Azimuth, agent provocateur, dandy and Dadaist. After studying law, philosophy and arts for two years, he joined the Melbourne Theater Company (MTC) as a comedian and oddball, where he created Dame Edna. The rest is travesty history.
Barry Humphries on farewell tour in London
Source: dpa
Humphries also played Tarragon in the first Australian production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1957. He spent the sixties in London and became part of the British comedy scene around Dudley Moore. He has acted in West End musicals such as ‘Oliver!’, was Long John Silver in a stage version of ‘Treasure Island’. He later also invented the cartoon character Barry McKenzie, also an Australian living in London with many foreigners, for the magazine “Private Eye” based on the drawings by Nicholas Garland; in Australia the strips were temporarily banned.
She performed her best sketches worldwide as a one-woman show until 2013, always there until her death in 2008: the always mute Emily Perry as Madge, Edna’s former bridesmaid from New Zealand, who staunchly endured her. Appropriately enough, Edna Everage made her last film appearance in 2016 in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.
A lover of old books (with a library of 25,000 volumes) and avant-garde music, Barry Humphries was considered by some to be the greatest comedian since Charlie Chaplin. And he really didn’t want his lady alter-ego mentioned in the obituaries! Impossible, unfortunately. But now he’s retired quite befittingly: he died in Sydney on April 22 of complications following hip surgery (too many high heels?). The colorful and evil marsupial was 89 years old. In this sense: By, Possum, By Dame Edna!
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