Remembering dear Barry Humphries – and Dame Edna – a year on. By Mark McGinness
Dame Edna Everage died a year ago today – spookily, the same day as her long-suffering manager, Barry Humphries. She always seemed so real to me and I was surprised when The Daily Telegraph and about a decade earlier, The Times, baulked at according her an obituary. Both editors felt she was more a Feature – and so she appeared as one in The Daily Telegraph on 23 April 2023. And what a Feature.
She was surely Australia’s greatest, certainly most monstrous, comic creation, inspired and challenged, entertained and insulted the public for six decades.
Dame Edna must have been close to 100, a contemporary of her friend and confidante, the late Queen. When she first emerged from Moonee Ponds in 1955, she was a young mother in her thirties.
Proudly furth-generation Australian, her great-grandmother and namesake, Edna Beazley, was apparently convicted of stealing a gladiolus from a Covent Garden florist and transported. She claimed the first Edna was transported, not on the First Fleet, but in 1770 on The Endeavour with Captain Cook (of course The Endeavour carried no convicts). Bu then, history was never Edna’s strong suit. She lived for the present.
She met Barry in June 1955. He saw potential when he came across her in a performance of the Passion Play at Moonee Ponds’ Holy Trinity Hall. Edna was a mauve-haired Mary Magdalene opening the scene at the House of Simon the Leper with the words, “Christ your feet look awful. Let me give them a bit of TLC.”
Barry thought he could be Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins. By then she was, in her own words, “an unhappily married woman” wed to Norm Everage - a slight, khaki-faced, ill-looking man considerably older than he had led her to believe. He would soon be permanently confined to his room - strapped to a hideous machine to deal with his dicky prostate.
Somehow they were blest with four children earning Edna first prize in a ‘Lovely Mother’ contest, despite her dictum “I’ve decided to put my family last. It’ll be best for them in the end” (Norm, died unmourned, in 1988 and Edna promptly founded ‘Friends of the Prostate’).
America did not “get” Edna at first. An appearance off Broadway in the late 1970s was savaged. Barry vowed that Edna would return to Broadway but not until the critic died. She had to wait 25 years. And so, in 2000, she triumphed with The Royal Tour and won a Tony.
She triumphed too on television with appearances as Claire Otoms, a client, later secretary, on Ally McBeal.
Meanwhile, her home country had claimed her. In 1972, she appeared as Aunt Edna with her nephew in The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. In the last moments of its sequel, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, in 1974 she was dubbed a dame by Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. (An extraordinary honour given he had abolished imperial honours on winning office in 1972). As Dame Edna, she never looked back.
Throughout the 1980s her fame grew with a succession of TV shows & a winning formula - Edna insulting the grandest celebrities before a live audience.
She was, of course, a regular Pantomime Dame, but she also played a vivacious Mrs. Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby (2002).
She was also a popular author - a memoir - My Gorgeous Life - and three other essential guides to life.
She remained close to the Windsors - giving advice even when it was not sought and latterly claimed a new boyfriend - Thomas Markle, the unhappy, reclusive, estranged father of the Duchess of Sussex.
Retirement was never for Edna. Ina any case, what home would take her? Until the end, wisteria-wigged, dressed like a Bird of Paradise, she kicked those quite astonishing legs, pursed and curled those lips and spat out the most perceptive, original, outrageous truths that ever fell from any stage, platform, or podium.
Vale, Edna – you’re horribly missed.
