Entertainer Miriam Margolyes has said her longtime friend Barry Humphries was "very hurt and saddened" after being "cancelled" by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in his final years.
Humphries, best known for his characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, died peacefully on Saturday, aged 89.
He has been remembered as a comedic genius who was a trailblazer in the entertainment industry, both in his home country of Australia and abroad.
The satirist and actor was instrumental in founding the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and was the namesake of the Barry Award for best show from 2000 to 2019.
But the Barry Award was renamed in 2019 following comments Humphries made about transgender people, which were deemed as "not helpful" by festival organisers.
The comments included calling gender-affirmation surgery "self mutilation" and labelling being transgender "a fashion".
The name change came after previous winners of the Barry, including Hannah Gadsby and Zoe Coombs Marr, called for the award to be renamed.
In a statement to the ABC, festival director Susan Provan called Humphries "an incredible artist and provocateur", but said "many in our industry were baffled by [his] comments that lacked empathy".
"Some years ago the award for most outstanding show was re-named to reinforce the equality and diversity that our Festival community has always championed," Ms Provan said.
"We can celebrate Barry’s artistic genius while not much liking some of his views."
Margolyes, a British-Australian television personality who has hosted programs on ABC TV, said she had known Humphries since she was 17 and was "heartbroken" by news of his passing.
"It's quite difficult to talk because I loved him and I admired him. He stood for all the things that I admire," she said.
"But we sharply disagreed politically. And it's joyous to me that it's possible to do that and still love somebody."
Margolyes said she did not believe Humphries was "properly appreciated by Australia" or treated well by MICF, who she said "cancelled him rather late in life".
"He'd had more talent in his little finger than they did in their whole bodies, all of them," she said.
Margolyes said she believed Humphries was "very hurt and saddened by what happened after the Melbourne festival".
"He was acerbic, and he was often quite nasty, but he was a genius, and you have to accept it," she said.
Famed director, and long-time friend and collaborator of Humphries, Bruce Beresford, said the decision to remove his name from the award was a "disgrace".
"I mean he's one of the great comic geniuses … how can you take his name off an award like that? How offensive, how insulting," Beresford told ABC Radio Melbourne.
"Barry, in many ways, was a kind of social commentator and satirist. He was really commenting and giving a view on incidents in the world around him. It was a point of view. I don't think it was malevolent or malicious.
"I'm always a bit puzzled with this thing about Barry's politics. I mean maybe I've never been that politically aware, but he always seemed to me to be quite balanced and quite sane. He was no fan of the extreme right, and I think he was no fan of the extreme left."
In announcing the winner of this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival award, as it is now known, Ms Provan on Sunday paid tribute to the impact of Humphries.
"Nothing can ever detract from his great contribution as an artist, he was remarkable and that will always be with us," she said.
Tributes and memories have poured from all over the globe since news of Humphries's death.
Margolyes said she last saw Humphries when they did a BBC radio show for Christmas Day.
"And it was a just a Christmas special of joy and delight and happiness and naughtiness ... it was it was a wonderful memory. It's a precious memory," she said.
She said she hoped "everybody realises what has gone" with Humphries's passing.
"Something irreplaceable, something magical," she said.
