The Australian comic who created Dame Edna

Barry Humphries inhabited numerous characters over his seven-decade career. There was the lecherous boozer Sir Les Patterson, the melancholic suburbanite Sandy Stone, the randy Australian expat Barry McKenzie. But all were eclipsed by Dame Edna, the lilac-coiffed diva who became an international icon. With her rhinestone glasses and garish ensembles, Edna—who greeted audiences with “Hello, possums”—was a catty Australian housewife turned self-described “gigastar” who aimed her caustic wit at both audience members and the celebrities she interviewed on her late-’80s TV show The Dame Edna Experience. “Do you laugh at yourself?” she asked British pol-turned-novelist Jeffrey Archer. “Because if not, you’re missing the joke of the century.” The erudite Humphries spoke of Edna in the third person, saying he felt as if he were standing “in the wings” as she performed. “Every now and then she says something extremely funny,” he said, “and I stand there and think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”

Humphries was born in a prosperous suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where his father was a builder and his housewife mother was “obsessed with cleanliness and respectable behavior,” said The Times (U.K.). Chafing at suburban propriety from a young age, he was drawn to playing dressup and performing. He attended Melbourne University but dropped out and began acting and pulling public performance-art stunts, influenced by the anarchic Dadaist art movement. He began developing Edna while touring with a production of Twelfth Night, said The Guardian. On bus rides he entertained his fellow actors with a character conceived as “a parody of the priggish streak” he saw in his mother and her peers. In the late 1950s, he moved to London, performing in West End plays. After spending time in rehab for alcoholism, he quit drinking in 1972; his career took flight soon after.

Humphries “found projects outside Dame Edna,” such as voicing Bruce the Shark in 2003’s Finding Nemo, said The Washington Post. But “Edna was always in the wings.” After winning a

Tony for Dame Edna: The Royal Tour in 1999, Humphries returned to Broadway in 2004 and 2010; he later played Edna as a recurring lawyer character on Fox’s Ally McBeal. “Believe me, my dear, I’ve tried to get rid of her many times,” he said in 2015. “Assassination attempts have been made, but like Fidel Castro, who has been given explosive cigars and poison, Edna survives.”