Barry Humphries, performed as Dame Edna
Oh, possums, Dame Edna is no more.
To be unflinchingly precise, Barry Humphries, the Australian-born actor and comic who for almost seven decades brought that divine doyenne of divadom, Dame Edna Everage, to delirious, dotty, disdainful, dadaist life, died Saturday in Sydney. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by the hospital where he had spent several days after undergoing hip surgery. In a tribute message posted on Twitter, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia praised Humphries as “a great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-a-kind.”
A stiletto-heeled, stilettotongued persona who might well have been the spawn of a menage a quatre involving Oscar Wilde, Salvador Dalí, Auntie Mame, and Miss Piggy, Dame Edna was not so much a character as a cultural phenomenon, a force of nature trafficking in wicked, sequined commentary on the nature 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 the longest-lived characters to be channeled by a single performer. She toured worldwide in a series of solo stage shows and was ubiquitous on television in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.
A master improviser (many of Dame Edna’s stinging barbs were ad-libbed) with a face like taffy, Mr. Humphries was esteemed as one of the world’s foremost theatrical clowns.
“I’ve only seen one man have power over an audience like that,” theater critic John Lahr told him, after watching Dame Edna night after night in London. “My father.” Lahr’s father was the great stage and cinematic clown Bert Lahr.
Humphries conceived Edna in 1955 as Mrs. Norm Everage, typical Australian housewife. “Everage,” after all, is Australian for “average.”
Edna soon became a case study in exorbitant amour propre, lampooning suburban pretensions, political correctness, and the cult of celebrity, acquiring a damehood along the way. A “housewife-superstar,” she called herself, upgrading the title in later years to “megastar” and, still later, to “gigastar.”
In Britain, where Mr. Humphries had long made his home, Dame Edna was considered a national treasure, a paragon of performance art long before the term was coined.
In the United States, she starred in a three-episode series, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood,” a mock celebrity talk show broadcast on NBC in the early 1990s, and was a frequent guest on actual talk shows.
She performed several times on Broadway, winning Mr. Humphries a special Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Theater World awards, for “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” his 1999 one-person show.
In her stage and TV shows, written largely by Mr. Humphries, Dame Edna typically made her entrance tottering down a grand staircase (Mr. Humphries was more than 6 feet tall) in a tsunami of sequins, her hair a bouffant violet cloud (she was “a natural wisteria,” she liked to say), her evening gown slit to the thigh to reveal Mr. Humphries’s surprisingly good legs, her body awash in jewels, her eyes agape behind sprawling rhinestone glasses (“face furniture,” she called them).
Addressing the audience, she delivered her signature greeting, “Hellooooo, possums!”
By turns tender and astringent, Dame Edna called audience members “possums” often. She also called them other things, as when, leaning across the footlights, she would address a woman in the front row in a confiding, carrying voice, “I know, dear. I used to make my own clothes, too.”
Performances concluded with Dame Edna flinging hundreds of gladioli into the crowd, no mean feat aerodynamically. “Wave your gladdies, possums!” she exhorted audience members who caught them, and the evening would end, to music, with a mass valedictory swaying.
Between the “Hellooooo” and the gladdies, Dame Edna’s audiences were treated to a confessional monologue deliciously akin to finding oneself stranded in a hall of vanity mirrors.
There was commentary on her husband and children (“I made a decision: I put my family last”); her beauty regimen (“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, among them Queen Elizabeth II and her family (“I’ve had to change my telephone number several times to stop them ringing me”).
Dame Edna’s TV shows were often graced by actual celebrity guests, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston, Sean Connery, Robin Williams, and Lauren Bacall.
They came in for no less of a drubbing than the audience did, starting with the inaugural affront, the affixing of immense name tags to their lapels — for eclipsed by the light of gigastardom so close at hand, who among us would not be reduced to anonymity?
Turning to the audience after delivering a particularly poisonous insult, she would ooze, “I mean that in the most caring way.”
Those guests who emerged relatively unscathed had the savvy to take Dame Edna at face value and interact with her as if she were real. The moment he donned those rhinestone glasses, Mr. Humphries often said, Dame Edna became real to him too, an entirely separate law unto herself.
“I’m, as it were, in the wings, and she’s onstage,” Mr. Humphries explained in a 2015 interview with Australian television. “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 truly funny thing, possums, is that when Mr. Humphries first brought Dame Edna to life, he intended her to last only a week or so. What’s more, she was meant to have been played by distinguished actress Zoe Caldwell.
Mr. Humphries created a string of other characters over the years — notably, the boorish, bibulous Australian cultural attache Sir Les Patterson. But it was Dame Edna, the outlandish aunt who engenders adoration and mortification in equal measure, who captivated the public utterly.
By all accounts far more erudite than Dame Edna — he was an accomplished painter, bibliophile, and art collector — Mr. Humphries, in a sustained act of self-protection, always spoke of her in the third person.
She did likewise. “My manager,” she disdainfully called him. (She also called Mr. Humphries “a money-grubbing little slug” and accused him of embezzling her fortune. He did, it must be said, cash a great many of her checks.)
John Barry Humphries was born in Kew, a Melbourne suburb, on Feb. 17, 1934. His father, Eric, was a prosperous builder; his mother, Louisa, was a homemaker.
From his earliest childhood in Camberwell, a more exclusive suburb, he felt oppressed by the bourgeois conformism that enveloped his parents and their circle, and depressed by his mother’s cold suburban propriety.
Dame Edna was a response to those forces.
“I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in Lahr’s book “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.”
Mr. Humphries’s first marriage, to Brenda Wright, ended 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 Tong, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his marriage to Millstead.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that his survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of British poet Stephen Spender; his children; and 10 grandchildren.