Barry Humphries dies aged 89
![Barry Humphries. Copyright: BBC Barry Humphries. Copyright: BBC](https://cdn.comedy.co.uk/images/library/people/900x450/d/dame_edna_bbc.jpg)
- Australian comedy icon Barry Humphries has died
- The satirist and performer best known as Dame Edna Everage was 89
Comedy star Barry Humphries has died at the age of 89.
Best known for character alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, the performer, satirist, composer, writer and actor established himself as a comic talent in Britain amidst the satirical comedy revolution of the 1960s, and lived primarily in London for the rest of his life.
He died in his native Australia on Saturday 22nd April 2023 (local time), after complications from a hip operation lead to his hospitalisation earlier in the week. Humphries had been in Australia since December, and had sustained an injury earlier this year whilst reaching for a book and tripping on a rug at his home there, according to reports.
Born on 17th February 1934, he debuted suburban housewife Dame Edna - then the much more mousey Mrs Norman Everage - in a 1955 university production, originally intending the character to last no more than a week. Becoming ever more outrageous and exuberant with each passing year, she had been based upon his own mother, Louisa, and inspired by the conservative suburban Melbourne community in which he had grown up.
After moving to Britain in 1959 he was soon working with some of the era's most exciting and celebrated comic talent, including Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, satirists John Bird, John Fortune and John Wells, and Pythons John Cleese, Michael Palin and Terry Jones.
![The Late Show. Image shows left to right: John Wells, John Bird, Andrew Duncan, Eleanor Bron, Anthony Holland, Barry Humphries. Credit: BBC The Late Show. Image shows left to right: John Wells, John Bird, Andrew Duncan, Eleanor Bron, Anthony Holland, Barry Humphries. Credit: BBC](https://cdn.comedy.co.uk/images/library/comedies/900x450/t/the_late_show.jpg)
Playing a central role in the ensemble satire The Late Show (1966 - 1967) significantly raised his profile, and Humphries was soon starring in a range of series and specials of his own, including Barry Humphries' Scandals, The Barry Humphries Show, and a trio of celebrated editions of LWT's An Audience With... strand.
The Dame Edna Experience (1987 - 1989) was also produced by LWT in the same period, with A Night On Mount Edna, Dame Edna's Hollywood, Dame Edna's Work Experience and Dame Edna Kisses It Better.
Usually appearing as Dame Edna, but sometimes - or also - as Sir Les Patterson, an apparent Australian diplomat, he also accumulated many dozens of further appearances across other chat shows, comedy specials and variety programmes, and even made La Dame Aux Gladiolas, a mockumentary edition of BBC Two's highbrow arts and culture documentary series Arena.
2019's Dame Edna Rules The Waves would prove to be the character's final television special, although Humphries continued to work, including performing live shows and making radio series, both in the UK and Australia, until early 2023.
Married four times, Humphries leaves his wife Lizzie and four children. A number of DVD collections of his work have previously been released, plus a memoir, an autobiography, and a spoof "unauthorised" biography of Dame Edna.
The Dame Edna Experience - The Complete Series
![The Dame Edna Experience - The Complete Series](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/514O+OVdxRL._SL325_.jpg)
She's no ordinary star, she's a megastar! Larger than life and brimming with wit and hilarity, she's Dame Edna Everage! And she's inviting you to explore all her nooks and crannies in The Dame Edna Experience.
Available for the first time ever, this series of six variety/chat shows (or, as Dame Edna calls them, "monologues interrupted by total strangers") is guaranteed to keep you in stitches.
Celebrity guests (foils for Dame Edna's rapier wit) include Sean Connery, Charlton Heston, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Seymour, Larry Hagman, Rudolf Nureyev and Joan Rivers.
First released: Sunday 8th April 2007
- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
- Catalogue: 7952601
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Distributor: Network
- Region: All
- Discs: 1
- Catalogue: 7952601
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
An Audience With... - Dame Edna
![An Audience With... - Dame Edna](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/510fN8L5YgL._SL325_.jpg)
Unarguably Australia's greatest export, Housewife Superstar Dame Edna Everage takes time out of her busy schedule to answer questions about her life and voice her opinions to a star-studded audience on no less than three separate occasions.
Star of stage and screen, her presence, charm and wit has graced television screens since the late 1960s from when she has been propelled from just being an average housewife into the media megastar we know and love today. Her television shows are always highly successful - both with critics and viewers, so much so that An Audience With Dame Edna won a BAFTA in 1980 for Best Entertainment Programme.
This release features all three An Audience With... shows that Dame Edna starred in and will appeal to everyone, darlings!
First released: Monday 14th November 2005
- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 2
- Minutes: 150
- Catalogue: 7952328
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
Barry Humphries - More Please: An Autobiography
![Barry Humphries - More Please: An Autobiography](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41F6Psyh3tL._SL325_.jpg)
Get a fascinating insight into the man behind the make-up and glasses in Barry Humphries's one and only autobiography.
Because Barry Humphries has deliberately furnished would-be biographers with whimsical fictions and blatant mystifications, the true details of his life are among the best-kept secrets of our time. More Please, prophetically his first utterance, reveals the man behind the actor.
This best-selling book moves from suburban Australia of the 1930s, 40s and 50s to Humphries's international stardom and his revelations and confessions will astonish his vast audience, being so wildly at odds with all that has gone before.
First published: Monday 21st September 1992
- Publisher: Viking
- Pages: 346
- Catalogue: 9780670840083
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Published: Thursday 24th September 1992
- Publisher: Viking
- Pages: 346
- Catalogue: 9780670849109
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Published: Thursday 2nd March 2017
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- Pages: 384
- Catalogue: 9780241977484
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Published: Thursday 4th November 1993
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- Catalogue: 9780140860023
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
Barry Humphries - My Life As Me: A Memoir
![Barry Humphries - My Life As Me: A Memoir](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41-wrcuPqiL._SL325_.jpg)
Taking up where the hugely popular More Please left off, this memoir brings Barry's autobiography up-to-date, but also returns to his early and middle years to deepen the picture already presented.
It explores his remaking of himself, his love/hate relationship with Australia and his adventures of the heart and stage.
First published: Thursday 28th November 2002
- Publisher: Viking
- Pages: 352
- Catalogue: 9780670888344
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
Barry Humphries - Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography
![Barry Humphries - Handling Edna: The Unauthorised Biography](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Tc1KyU9CL._SL325_.jpg)
The real story behind Dame Edna, the international superstar!
In this unauthorised biography of Dame Edna Everage, acquired for an unprecedented advance and in spectacular secrecy, her long-time manager and the man who was there from the very beginning, Barry Humphries, takes a behind-the-scenes, no-holds-barred look at an icon of our times.
Superstar, swami, confidante and advisor to royalty, Hollywood stars and international political leaders, Dame Edna's life has catapulted her from her humble Moonee Ponds beginnings as a suburban housewife to the most elite social and artistic circles in the world.
Who would have thought that this modest Australian woman could achieve so much from London to Louisiana to New York to Tokyo? Who could have anticipated her global fame? Barry Humphries certainly didn't.
Dame Edna may not like this book but Barry knows everything - the who, the why and the where - and in this much-anticipated work, for the first time, he reveals all. This exhaustively researched account of Edna's roller-coaster life is essential reading for scholars, female achievers, fans of Dame Edna and those who feel that behind the fairy-tale career lies a darker and more sinister story...
First published: Thursday 16th September 2010
- Published: Thursday 15th September 2011
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Pages: 350
- Catalogue: 9781409120582
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Download: 7.05mb
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Released: Friday 22nd October 2010
- Distributor: Orion
- Minutes: 245
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Publisher: Hachette
- Catalogue: 9780733624001
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
- Published: Thursday 1st January 1970
- Publisher: Orion
- Catalogue: 9781409122715
Buy and sell old and new items
Search for this product on eBay
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.
Ian Davidson - A Warm Hand On Your Opening: The Art Of Barry Humphries - A Pom's Eye View
![Ian Davidson - A Warm Hand On Your Opening: The Art Of Barry Humphries - A Pom's Eye View](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Z9cJxQGiL._SL325_.jpg)
In A Warm Hand Barry and his co-writer for half a century, Ian Davidson, rifle through a boxful of hilarious memories, anecdotes and the best of the scripts, unmasking Dame Edna Everage, Les Patterson, the appalling Lance Boyle and Barry's other creations, to reveal the comic genius within.
Originally ill at ease at being himself, this dandified Salvador Dali of the stage delved deep to discover his expansive repertoire of character and innuendo, which blurs the boundaries between surrealism, satire and plain bullying.
Pre-eminent is Dame Edna, the cunning-linguist who reels in her audiences with cutting-edge wordplay and so humiliates them that we fear there will indeed be 'tears before bed-time'. But then the crying pathos of her poor victim's life yields to its comic possibilities which she pursues as relentlessly, so to ensure that in the end our only tears are those of helpless laughter.
Illustrated with 22 photographs, many of them in colour, this is a book for all who have enjoyed more than half a century of Barry Humphries's penetrating art, including would-be writers, actors, directors, producers - anyone with an interest in an insider's view of how he came to take the worldwide stage by storm.
First published: Saturday 1st July 2017
- Publisher: Pilot Produtions
- Download: 15.02mb
BCG may earn commission on sales generated through the links above.