BARRY HUMPHRIES:

“It’s easier being Edna!”

From the outside, Barry Humphries’ home in north west London is unassuming. Inside, every inch of wall is lined with gorgeous pre-Raphaelite paintings, bookcases heave with first editions. There are thousands of books. I wait for him in a pale blue sitting room with tones of hyacinth. His wife Lizzie is there. She is tall and elegant and very funny. Barry is wearing a purple linen jacket, a green pullover and purple corduroy trousers but the corduroy is horizontal, in perfect keeping with the idea that Barry likes to blend in, seem normal but is actually completely the other way. Barry is the creator of many diverse personas – Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and the ghost Sandy Stone. Often they could say things that Barry himself could not. He is a rare

breed – a man who is altogether available and unavailable at once. He’s intimate, yet detached, kind and razor sharp, cutting. You wonder if it’s hard for Barry Humphries to be Barry Humphries. Last year he put on an intriguing show at London’s Barbican Theatre with the Australian chanteuse Meow Meow. It was a fascinating journey through songs from the Weimar Republic, composers who were banned by Hitler that Barry had rediscovered as a child. He was whip-smart and funny as himself.

“I’m getting confidence now to do things as myself. I’ve always preferred to be heavily disguised but a disguise I’ve never used is the disguise of myself.”

He’s just back from Australia and is still suffering from jet lag. “Edna’s coming back,” he whispers, in case

I hadn’t heard. Her tour kicks off in Canberra in September. “She’s in very good shape. She’s been measured for new frocks and three songs have been written.”

Edna did a retirement world tour a couple of years back and claimed she would put away her sequined winged glasses for good. “My first song for this show is written and it’s all about why Edna didn’t retire.

It’s a wonderful song explaining to the audience why it was impossible to retire. It says there were too many people trying to copy me, including Barry Humphries, and it was time they reacquainted themselves with the real thing. Too many clones.”

It seems Barry works tirelessly. He is revising the comic strip Barry McKenzie, writing the new Edna show and in the meantime, he has a show at the London Palladium.

I remember going to an Edna show in Drury Lane and I caught a gladioli. “You catch gladioli like you catch Ebola. Right place, right time you get it.” I laugh, he smiles. “I like anyone who can make me and an audience laugh,” he quips.

Barry hopes his show will be a conversation about how comedy has changed, about what’s funny and what isn’t. Does he think that the fashion has changed in his and Edna’s lifetime? “Not in a drastic way. More and more people want to be comedians. In my day, not many people wanted to be a comedian as an ambition. It wasn’t profitable. But with television and all the other outlets and also fame attached to being a comedian, comedians are the new rockstars. Billy Connolly was the first rockstar comedian.”

What will be some of his greatest comedy moments, I ask. “I’m still deciding but there will be some scenes from the Marx Brothers, Steve Martin and Woody Allen. And I’d like to include some of my own early films. Lizzie says if she hears me laughing in another room, she knows I’m laughing at one of my own jokes. She can tell.”

He remembers going to his first comedy show. “It was an amazing discovery when I went to the Tivoli with my parents. The Tivoli was a disreputable theatre in Melbourne which had variety shows, but on this occasion my parents went because I was a fan of someone called Arthur Askey, a British comedian. To hear a man on stage making the whole audience laugh was a miracle to me. I thought, I wonder how they do that and the seed was planted, little knowing that I might one day ...”

In the past, Barry has described Edna as being opinionated, acerbic and bolshy, and did he even like her? “I like the effect she has on the audience. She makes them laugh.” Thus, Edna gave Barry the gift he’d wanted as a child. And it must have been hard for him to give her up to be on stage as himself, as he is much shyer.

The prep for Edna – the dresses, the wigs, the make-up, the dancing, the eight shows a week – must have been very exhausting. And everyone’s always asking where does Barry end and Edna begin? Suddenly there was no circle. Edna was ended. But it seems he couldn’t live without her and her voice. He is eager for the Australian tour.

Barry is nostalgic about the comedians and the Australia from his youth. “When they’d done every stage in England several times, when the audience could repeat the words of their comic routines, they went to Melbourne to the Tivoli. They made jokes I didn’t understand and I noticed my parents exchanging guilty looks – must have been naughty jokes – risqué. Little did I know I would become a risqué comedian – blue comic, as they were called. When I first got a gig at a return serviceman’s club in Sydney in the 1950s, they said to me, ‘the audience likes blue material’, and at the age of 22 I was so naïve I wore

my Sunday best blue three-piece suit. I thought the material was fabric.”

Barry has had a 64-year career on stage. By now he knows the difference. He cuts an impressive figure today

– so colourful and energetic and still has the legs for Edna. Does he feel 85? “No, I feel 52,” he says.

He likes to paint. He enjoys a good restaurant – especially one owned by a celebrity chef – and he has friendships with many luminaries including Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. He’s done countless world tours and written two memoirs – My Life as Me and More Please, both achingly well written. He has courted danger and controversy throughout.

I’ve always wondered though, is it a political statement? Why is it that Edna never wears a bra?

“She’s never been embarrassed to say that she was blessed in many ways but not that way. She waited for something to appear but it never took place. She found the twin-set helpful and that if she wore elaborate spectacles no-one’s eyes dropped south of the glasses. She’s never tried to be a sex object. She’s very relieved she’s not known as that. They’re a miserable lot, the sex objects.”

He is the master of being attached and detached all at the same time. It’s been so long since he had a drink, he doesn’t really treat it as an issue anymore. “It’s a nice thing but a life’s a life. For some people like me it’s off the menu. It just doesn’t work. I have it in the house for other people. I could give you an absinthe if you want one. I brought upon myself some horrible events.”

Barry’s parents, he says, were far from encouraging. “I remember my mother saying, ‘Look at that comedian. It’s pathetic at his age,’ but the comedian she was referring to was only about 50. These days 85 is the new 50.”

He was not there when his mother died. He was told she was in hospital but it was nothing serious. “I come from a family who have a great deal of prudishness about illness. If someone was very ill we’d say he hasn’t been very well lately, which means dying.”

Also, perhaps the family didn’t tell his mother she was gravely ill.

“That’s right. I had a vision of someone coming back to Australia after a long absence and going to the family home and finding it was occupied by Ukrainians, and then you say to your sister, ‘What’s happened to Mum and Dad?’ ‘Oh, they died, but we didn’t want to worry you.’ … Sometimes I think it would be funny to advertise the new show and then say to the audience coming in, ‘Very sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but Dame Edna has passed away. We didn’t want to worry you’.”

Does he forgive his parents? “Yes, I sympathise with them. I agree with them wholeheartedly about everything they said to me that offended me at the time. My parents were very nice. They had a hard time with me. Whenever I did a performance or asserted myself in any way at a family gathering, my mother would say, ‘Don’t look at Barry, he’s drawing attention to himself.’ I thought that would be a good name for a show. Barry Humphries draws attention to himself one more time. Maybe I’ll call my new show that. My mother had a series of phrases. They weren’t original but they were, on her lips, rather devastating. She timed it perfectly. She was a frustrated artist I think, and they are dangerous people, frustrated artists. You know Hitler was a frustrated artist. She was very hard to please, so I grew up with the assumption that women were

impossible to please, and some of them obliged me by conforming to this, by being impossible.”

Barry has had four wives. The first was Brenda Wright, a dancer (19551957), when he was 21 and she was 19. It ended quickly. Of the marriage she has said, “There’s nothing about Barry Humphries that I want to remember. My marriage to him was a long time ago and thankfully every year takes me a little further away from it.” Then came Rosalind Tong (1959-1970) a dancer, and artist Diane Millstead (1979-1989), mother of his two sons Oscar and Rupert. Finally, in 1990, he wed Lizzie Spender, actress and equestrian, daughter of the poet Stephen. He has two daughters, Tessa and Emily, with his second wife.

“Women are impossible but not Lizzie. She’s the exception. It took four marriages to find her,” he says.

Perhaps he should have kept them as girlfriends and not actually married them.

“I was doing very well financially,” he quips, “and I thought, I’ve got to get rid of this money somehow.”

He once said of his children, “I think their abiding memories of their father are a man surrounded by suitcases.” Now he says, “They’re all doing well. Two daughters in Melbourne: one a painter, the other an actor. My son Oscar is an art expert and dealer. My son Rupert co-wrote a video game called Red Dead Redemption and he’s hugely successful. All of these children of mine are mostly well-behaved and don’t require any financial support. What more could you wish? Rupert has twins and I dote on them, and Oscar has a daughter.”

Barry is presented with a contraption and he grimaces. He says to his assistant who has just delivered it, “You had to do that in front of a journalist, didn’t you? So far the grim reaper has made very few inroads but my hearing has suffered.”

His hearing doesn’t seem to be any different with the contraption but

I can hear a high-pitched squeaking.

The hearing aid has done the opposite of aid and it’s reminding Barry of all the restaurants he doesn’t like to go in because they’re too loud – “the Caprice is deafening”.

He seems a little sheepish about being 85. There must be a sense of time running out, but he is also conscious of posterity. I ask what he fears.

“Obscurity and ghosts,” he says quickly. “I’m scared of ghosts. I believe in them and I’m very wary of them. I don’t like to sleep in haunted places and Australia’s very spooky. Ghosts are there – explorers and senior citizens.

“I’ve promised to be one. There is a theatre in Adelaide called Her Majesty’s. They are redeveloping it, and I’ve promised to be a ghost there.”