Celebrated Australian entertainer Barry Humphries is being celebrated globally after dying aged 89 from complications after hip surgery.
The comedy legend was best known for his alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson.
He died on Saturday at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney surrounded by his immediate family, including his wife of 30 years Lizzie Spender, his children and 10 grandchildren.
“He was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit,” his family said in a statement on Saturday night.
” With over 70 years on the stage, he was an entertainer to his core, touring up until the last year of his life and planning more shows that will sadly never be.
“His passing leaves a void in so many lives.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Humphries was a great wit, satirist, writer and one of a kind.
“He was both gifted and a gift,” Mr Albanese said.
Tributes flowed from all corners of the world and, unsurprisingly, many came from Humphries’ fellow travellers in the world of entertainment, including British comedians Ricky Gervais and Matt Lucas and Australians Adam Hills, Rove McManus, Marty Fields and Jason Donavon.
Gervais took to Twitter to say: “Farewell, Barry Humphries, you comedy genius.”
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was one of the “greatest ever Australians.”
“A comic genius who used his exuberant alter egos, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, to say the otherwise unsayable.”
Humphries, lived in London for decades and returned to Sydney in December for Christmas.
He subsequently suffered a fall and ended up having to have a hip replacement.
Humphries delighted and outraged audiences for more than half a century with his cavalcade of grotesques, presented in a unique blend of old-style music hall and contemporary satire.
Among them were the gross Sir Les Patterson, Australia’s cultural attache to the Court of St James; the melancholy and rambling Sandy Stone; and, in comic strip and film, the chundering Ocker in Pommyland, Barry McKenzie.
The multi-talented Humphries was also a respected character actor with many stage and screen credits, an author of novels and autobiography, and an accomplished landscape painter.
Humphries had four marriages, reformed from alcoholism and took his shows around Australia and the world.
Born in Melbourne on February 17, 1934 his parents were comfortable, loving and strait-laced.
Before he’d finished at Melbourne Grammar, Humphries was more interested in art and secondhand bookshops than football or cadets.
Humphries joined the Melbourne Theatre Company and while touring Victoria created Edna Everage as a dowdy, complacent Moonee Ponds housewife. That Edna was a long way from the internationally feted, egomaniacal superstar she was to become.
He moved to Sydney, joining the Philip Street Revue.
In 1959 he settled in London and was soon working in Peter Cook’s comedy venue The Establishment.
Humphries, with New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland, created the Barry McKenzie comic strip for the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1964.
Bazza was a boozy parody of the ugly Australian abroad, full of phrases like the “technicolour yawn”, “siphon the python” and “the one-eyed trouser snake”, but also a foil for the pompous, devious and hypocritical Poms.
When the strips came out as a book, the Australian government banned it because it “relied on indecency for its humour”.
By then Humphries’ drinking was out of control. In Melbourne in late 1970, he was charged with being drunk and disorderly and was rolled in a city gutter.
He finally admitted himself to a hospital specialising in alcoholism for the treatment that would turn him into a lifelong abstainer.
In 1972 came the first Barry McKenzie film – financially supported by the Australian government, despite the earlier ban.
It was savaged by the critics, largely because they trembled at what the world’s first film to feature full frontal vomiting would do to Australia’s image overseas.
But it was a popular success sparked a renaissance in the moribund Australian film industry.
A sequel two years later included Gough Whitlam knighting Edna, who was McKenzie’s aunt.
Outside Australia, she struggled for a while, with her early London appearances being panned.
Dame Edna was introduced by, on debut, Sir Les (“I’m as full as a bull’s bum”) Patterson.
The Dame picked out “possums” from the audience and make them squirm – the “Senior” drugged for his evening leave from the twilight home; or for an exchange of confidences, like “My husband has never seen me naked, nor has he expressed the least desire to do so.” It ended in a blizzard of gladdies.
It was a huge critical and popular success.
The show bombed in New York. Humphries said: “When the New York Times tells you to close, you close.”
Dame Edna was more than Humphries in drag. She was a fully formed character, with family and background, memories and tastes.
Humphries remained wedded to the stage until the very end, even as his health deteriorated.
Humphries married four times. The first, to Melbourne actress Brenda Wright when he was 21, was brief.
He is survived by his wife Lizzie, his children Tessa, Emily, Oscar and Rupert, and 10 beloved grandchildren.
© AAP 2023
