Dame Edna creator Barry Humphries dies in Sydney at 89

By Associated Press

CANBERRA: Tony Award-winning comedian Barry Humphries, internationally renowned for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven a few years, has died. He was 89.

His dying inside the Sydney hospital, the place he spent numerous days with issues following hip surgical process, was confirmed by his family.

“He was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit,” a family assertion said.

“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,” they added.

Humphries had lived in London for a few years and returned to native Australia in December for Christmas.
He knowledgeable The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper last month that his physiotherapy had been “agony” following his fall and hip various.

“It was the most ridiculous thing like all domestic incidents are. I was reaching for a book, my foot got caught on a rug or something, and down I went,” Humphries said of his fall.

Humphries has remained an full of life entertainer, touring Britain last 12 months collectively along with his one-man current “The Man Behind the Mask.”

The character of Dame Edna began as a dowdy Mrs Norm Everage, who first took to the stage in Humphries’ hometown of Melbourne inside the mid-Nineteen Fifties. She mirrored a postwar suburban inertia and cultural blandness that Humphries found stifling.

Edna is taken into account certainly one of Humphries’ numerous enduring characters. The subsequent most well-known is Sir Les Patterson, an ever-drunk, dishevelled and lecherous Australian cultural attache.

Patterson mirrored a notion of Australia as a Western cultural wasteland that drove Humphries along with many essential Australian intellectuals to London.

Humphries, a regulation school dropout, found essential success as an actor, writer and entertainer in Britain inside the Seventies, nevertheless the United States was an ambition that he found stubbornly elusive.

A extreme degree inside the United States was a Tony Award in 2000 for his Broadway current “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to the celebrated comedian.

“For 89 years, Barry Humphries entertained us through a galaxy of personas, from Dame Edna to Sandy Stone,” Albanese tweeted, referring to the melancholic and rambling Stone, thought of certainly one of Humphries’s most enduring characters. “But the brightest star in that galaxy was always Barry. A great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind, he was both gifted and a gift.”

British comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted: “Farewell, Barry Humphries, you comedy genius.”

Piers Morgan, a British television persona, tweeted: “One of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”

“A wondrously intelligent, entertaining, daring, provocative, mischievous comedy Genius,” Morgan added.

The multi-talented Humphries was moreover a revered character actor with many stage and show display credit score, an author of novels and an autobiography, and an accomplished panorama painter.

John Barry Humphries was born in Melbourne on Feb. 17, 1934. His dad and mother have been comfortable, loving and strait-laced, and might want to have puzzled about their eldest son, whom they generally known as Sunny Sam. His mother used to tell him to stop drawing consideration to himself.

Before he’d accomplished on the celebrated Melbourne Grammar School, Humphries was further all in favour of art work and secondhand bookshops than soccer. At 16, his favourite author was Kafka and later said he “felt a little foreign.”

He spent two years at Melbourne University, the place he embraced Dadaism — the subversive, anarchic and absurdist European art work movement.

His contributions included “Pus In Boots,” waterproof rubber boots filled with custard, and, on the effectivity art work side, getting on a tram with an apparently blind accomplice whom Humphries would kick inside the shins whereas yelling “Get out of my way, you disgusting blind person.”

In 1959, he settled in London and was rapidly working in Peter Cook’s comedy venue The Establishment. He carried out Sowerberry inside the distinctive London manufacturing of “Oliver!” in 1960 and repeated the place on Broadway. He appeared with Spike Milligan and William Rushton in “Treasure Island.”

Humphries, with New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland, created the Barry McKenzie sketch for the satirical journal Private Eye in 1964.

When the strips received right here out as a e book, the Australian authorities banned it on account of it “relied on indecency for its humour.”

Humphries professed delight on the publicity and implored authorities to not elevate the ban.

By then Humphries’ consuming was uncontrolled. In Melbourne in late 1970, he was charged with being drunk and disorderly. He lastly admitted himself to a hospital specialising in alcoholism for the treatment that can flip him proper right into a lifelong abstainer.

In 1972 received right here the first Barry McKenzie film — financially supported by the Australian authorities, whatever the sooner ban. It was savaged by the critics, largely on account of they trembled at what the world’s first film to operate beer-induced vomiting would do to Australia’s image overseas.

But it was a popular success and a sequel two years later included then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam knighting Edna, who was McKenzie’s aunt.

Married 4 situations, he is survived by his partner Lizzie Spender, 4 children and 10 grandchildren.

His dying inside the Sydney hospital, the place he spent numerous days with issues following hip surgical process, was confirmed by his family.

“He was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit,” a family assertion said.googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.present(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2′); );