Barry Humphries at 90 - Mark McGinness

The great Barry Humphries would have been 90 on February 17th. Mark McGinness salutes him

Barry Humphries would have been 90 on 17 February. For the life he lived, it is remarkable that he saw his 89^th birthday. In his last weeks, at home in Australia at last after the pandemic, that extraordinary vitality was waning.

On 21 April 2023, this writer sent a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald urging a bedside dubbing of the English-speaking Commonwealth’s most revered entertainer. It is true - his alter-egos already boasted a knighthood and a damehood; and imperial honours for Australians were now considered anachronistic – but he was himself a CBE (2007) and British-based Australians continued to be knighted. Sir Frank Lowy in 2017 for example. Another billionaire philanthropist, Michael Hintze, knighted in 2013, was even made a peer in 2022.

So there was a hope that the new King would send his Governor of New South Wales, Margaret Beazley, to Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital to confer a KBE or - more appropriately - a KCVO on the friend who had amused Him for decades.

And it would have been so fitting that someone so close to Edna Everage should be the one to confer the honour. Spookily, she was Edna Beazley before she wed Norm. Her Excellency the Governor and Edna, both descendants of the First Fleet, must surely have been cousins? In the Dame’s case, her great-great-grandmother and namesake, Edna Beazley, had apparently been convicted of stealing a gladiolus from a Covent Garden florist and transported.

So, here was a chance for reparation. Alas, it proved an opportunity lost and there was never to be an ‘Arise Sir Barry’ moment as he died in the hospital on 22 April 2023. Interestingly, and perhaps more appropriately, some seven weeks later he was posthumously awarded his country’s highest honour, Companion of the Order of Australia, in the King’s first birthday honours.

Interviewed in 2006, he confessed, "If I die, I hope it won't be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me” and he feared being “pissed upon” in his obituary. Fortunately he died in Australia’s other city and was relieved to learn, a few years before his death, that not only had the said obituarist predeceased him but that the obituary was lost in the ether when the publisher amalgamated its systems. As it was, a little like his contributions as an Oldie columnist, he yielded not one but four obituaries for this writer in four different publications: as Barry, Dame Edna, Sandy and Sir Les.

Barry Humphries was simply the most original, versatile, enduring entertainer in Australia’s history. Author, actor, actress, librettist, poet, singer, commentator, interviewer, bibliophile, painter, dandy, iconoclast. The characters he brought to full-blooded life cannot be equalled in their ability to enlighten, amuse, abuse.

Born in Melbourne on February 17, 1934, John Barry Humphries was the first child of shy, dry Louisa (nee Brown) and confident, happy, generous Eric, a master builder. The childhood of “Sunny Sam”, as they called him, was happy: Eric Humphries’s increasingly prosperous business provided for his son’s every whim in the new garden suburb of Camberwell, even as a sister and two brothers appeared.

The conservatism, bigotry and middle-class between-the-wars snobbery prevalent in metropolitan Australia brought out the iconoclast in the teenaged Barry and that bastion of the establishment, Melbourne Grammar School, was not conducive. But he did establish an art club and regularly won the poetry prize. When the headmaster challenged him about the length of his hair, he retorted, “There’s one man in the chapel with hair longer than mine. His name is Jesus.” Of course, he failed maths and was a truant from sport and abjured cadets citing conscientious objection.

He began an Arts-Law degree at Melbourne University in 1951, but dropped out after two years, having devoted his time to student theatre and Dadaist absurdity: mounting provocative exhibitions involving old shoes and raw meat; and launching his first alter-ego, the mad bohemian Dr Aaron Azimuth, with elaborate pranks, such as eating vomit – in fact it was strategically deposited Heinz Russian salad. Performing this on board a QANTAS flight, he was subsequently banned.

After university, he took a job, arranged by his father, in a record-label warehouse but the theatre soon lured him away.

It was during a theatrical tour of country Victoria that his most-loved character was born. A tour-bus distraction, Edna Everage was inspired by the worthy women at post-show receptions, and his mother, Louisa.

His improvised comic creation made her stage debut in a 1955 Melbourne revue. Humphries’s then-unprecedented lampoon of Australian suburbia’s morals, mores, its prejudices and preoccupations struck a chord. As the decades rolled on, the Moonee Ponds housewife became Dame Edna, a housewife “gigastar”, a wisteria-haired monstre sacré a global celebrity.

In 1955, he was still a struggling actor – and a struggling husband. He had impulsively married dancer Brenda Wright that year, shortly before moving to Sydney to perform in revues, but his womanising and drinking soon led to separation.

Back in Melbourne, he recorded his first Sandy Stone monologue. Sandy - a combination of his Uncle Lewis and a childhood neighbour, Mr Whittle - described once as the dullest man on earth. For most of his subsequent stage life, he was a ghost, whistling from his chair in striped pyjamas, checked dressing gown and a hot-water bottle.

In Melbourne, he also met fellow actor Rosalind Tong, a former New Zealand Ballet dancer. After divorcing Brenda, he married Ros in April 1959, shortly before sailing to London, where their daughters Tessa (who became an actress) and Emily (an artist) were born in 1963 and 1965.

Humphries began his London life working in an ice-cream factory, but by 1960 was playing Mr Sowerberry in the West End hit Oliver! Although his involvement was cut short by a near-fatal slip down a Cornish cliff, which required a televised helicopter rescue, he returned for seasons in Toronto and New York (and as Fagin in 1967 and 1997 London revivals).

During the 1960s, he also returned to Australia for three successful solo shows featuring Edna and friends, but was otherwise based in London where he worked with and befriended Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. Another friend from a different world - they were essentially kindred spirits - was John Betjeman.

In addition to theatre and television engagements, he made his cinematic debut in the Moore-Cook film Bedazzled (1967), and contributed to Cook’s satirical magazine Private Eye – including the text for a cartoon about a clueless, cloddish Australian abroad, Barry McKenzie.

After ten impossible years together, at least half of them waiting for Barry to come home, Ros decided to remain in Melbourne with their daughters while he returned to London. After some tragic falls from grace (he was once found drunk and badly beaten by the road), the self-described “dissolute, guilt-ridden, self-obsessed boozer” was at his lowest. He entered a private hospital in Melbourne and, after treatment by Dr John Moon and attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous, he was at last, and forever, sober.

As in the previous decade, his career was a series of hits and misses during the 1970s. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) film, directed by his young friend Bruce Beresford, was a success; the sequel less so (although it did feature Edna being dubbed a Dame by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on her triumphant return home).

Britain enthusiastically embraced his solo shows, which now featured the red-faced, yellow-toothed, crimplene-suited, grossly-endowed cultural attaché, Sir Les Patterson (“I’m no orator, I’m an Australian politician”). He would introduce Edna with “Laaaaze un Genelmen, give her the clap; give her the clap she so richly deserves”

At first, America did not take to Edna. It was not until the 1990s that the United States warmed to her. She became so popular that she had a Vanity Fair column and a recurring role on the popular television series Ally McBeal. On both sides of the Atlantic, Edna also hosted chat shows, interviewing (if that is the word) stars from Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and Sean Connery to Ivana Trump and KD Laing. Her bridesmaid, the silent, much-put-upon, Madge Alsop, would produce paper name tags ‘Zsa’, ‘Chas’, ‘Sean’ – to remind Edna who she was interviewing.

Barry had always been a bibliophile and his success funded an extensive collection of books (some 50,000), despite the best efforts of Louisa who gave away 9-year-old Barry’s books to the Salvation Army. He was distraught. “But you’ve read them, Barry,” she laughed at him. “I hope you’re not going to grow up to be a selfish little boy.”

His habitual extravagance, divorce and a defrauding manager meant he sometimes had to sell but he must have been delighted, in 2011, to join that most exclusive bookish coterie, the Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812 by the 2nd Earl Spencer and limited to forty members. He also collected Victoriana (he cherished Oscar Wilde’s telephone book) and fine art, particularly from the late-19th and early-20th centuries (including many works by Australian Impressionist Charles Conder). He also took up the brush himself.

In 1979, he married his third wife, Diane Milstead. He used to say, “Some people have affairs between marriages; I have marriages between marriages.” They had two sons: Oscar, born in 1981, a fine art and design dealer; Rupert, born in 1982, a designer of video-games. Their nine-year relationship ended bitterly (Milstead described him as a “champion mattress-tester”).

In 1990, he married finally and forever, actress-playwright Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet, Sir Stephen Spender.

He too was an accomplished poet - more Betjeman-esque than Spender - and published several books of verse. Apart from his memoirs - More Please (1992), and My Life as Me (2002) and a handful of books on Barry McKenzie, he wrote a brilliant biography of the Dame, Handling Edna: the Unauthorised Biography (2009).

Edna, Les and Sandy proved prolific scribes too. Sandy’s superb monologues were overwhelmed by Edna’s coffee table book, a bedside companion and her own memoirs, My Gorgeous Life (1989). Sandy’s oeuvre was also sadly overshadowed by Sir Les’s canon. His appallingly offensive A Traveller’s Tool (1985) was unfortunately followed by a sequel, The Traveller’s Tool: ENLARGED in 2011.

In 2000, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s major award was renamed in his honour but in 2019 festival organisers stripped his name from the award amid outrage over his comments about transgender people. He said they had been “grossly interpreted”. Of course, Dame Edna condemned her manager, and distanced herself, or thought she did, by saying ‘My son has a husband; my daughter has a wife.’

He defied expectations of octogenarians by taking Edna and his other alter-egos on an extensive international farewell tour (the irrepressible dame’s retirement proved to be as short-lived as that other Great Australian Dame, Melba).

The 2015 Adelaide Cabaret Festival artistic directorship and a cabaret collaboration of Weimar Republic songs by chanteuse Meow Meow with the Australian Chamber Orchestra also confirmed the depth and breadth of his genius. He repeated this at Cadogan Hall in London the following year.

Equally at home in England and Australia - and yet always askance about both - he was never entirely absent from the limelight and continued to delight audiences until his dying breath. Having toured Australia with it in 2018, he toured England in 2022 with his show The Man Behind the Mask, in which he – John Barry Humphries – was, for the first time, the principal character. He confessed, ‘It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done.’

Until the end, he was courageous, uproarious, outrageous. Anne Pender, probably his best biographer (along with John Lahr), described him as “the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin”.

If only he could have lived to enjoy his 90^th birthday and Radio Four’s tribute on his 90th birthday on February 17th.