Like bouquets of appropriately lurid gladioli, colourful tributes to the memory of Barry Humphries piled up this weekend as his many fans adjusted to a dimmer world without Dame Edna Everage.
Mourning Humphries, who was taken ill in Sydney last week with complications after hip surgery, means saying goodbye to his charismatic, hyper-real fictional personas: not only “the Australian housewife and superstar” Dame Edna, with her radiant, rinsed hairdo, trademark sparkling spectacles and bright gladioli, but also to the revolting Australian cultural attaché, Sir Les Patterson, and the irrepressibly dull Sandy Stone. Over decades, each of these stage characters has mischievously shaped the world’s view of Australians, satirising the stereotypical lack of taste that British “pommies” enjoy looking down on.
The 89-year-old veteran performer died peacefully, his family announced on Saturday, and “was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit”. His influential career on stage and on television has since been recognised by fellow performers and national figures, including the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, who described him as both “gifted and a gift”.
Comedian Ricky Gervais hailed him as a “comedy genius”, while the Welsh presenter and comic actor Rob Brydon, who hosted a recent show with Humphries at London’s Palladium, described him as “a true great who inspired me immeasurably. It was a delight to call him my friend.”
Brydon had visited Humphries just three days earlier. “He was, as ever, making me laugh. His talent shone until the very end.” Esther Rantzen said “the world is just that bit sadder” after the death of her friend.
The joint statement from his widow, Lizzie Spender, and their wider family emphasised the value that Humphries put on his status as a showman, while reminding fans of his other active interests in poetry, painting and writing: “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. His audiences were precious to him, and he never took them for granted. Although he may be best remembered for his work in theatre, he was a painter, author, poet, and a collector and lover of art in all its forms.”
Albanese’s comment also underlined the power of the creative force behind the stage personas: “For 89 years, Barry Humphries entertained us through a galaxy of personas, from Dame Edna to Sandy Stone. But the brightest star in that galaxy was always Barry. A great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one of a kind, he was both gifted and a gift.”
Dame Edna famously admired the British royal family, recognising them as her peers. On tour in Vancouver, she once told the audience she always had the Queen, or “Lilibet”, travel ahead “to check out the restaurants, bounce on the bed at the Fairmont”. King Charles is believed to have returned the admiration, congratulating Humphries whenever they met. Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, Humphries revealed that “Prince Charles likes Les a lot”.
Humphries’ enduring popularity made him the subject of analysis, including major television profiles. Melvyn Bragg has always rated an interview for an episode of The South Bank Show dedicated to Humphries as “one of the oddest I’ve ever done”. “He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly.”
The performer’s arrival in Britain coincided with that of three other cultural titans from Australia: Germaine Greer, the groundbreaking feminist writer; Robert Hughes, the late art critic, and Clive James, the writer and Observer television critic, who died in 2019. The novelist Howard Jacobson noted how welcome the collective irreverence of this quartet was in the 2014 TV documentary Brilliant Creatures. Speaking to the Observer he said: “England was peculiarly receptive to the ideas of these people, perhaps because it badly needed to change … Barry, like the others, had longed for British sophistication. Yet he had to come over and beat us at our own game. He became a European dandy.”
His most famous creation, Dame Edna, based on his own aunts, first emerged in rather dowdy form in 1955. Early appearances of the lowly housewife from Moonee Ponds were at the Establishment nightclub in Soho, a venue set up by the satirical comic and Private Eye shareholder, Peter Cook.
But in later years, after damehood, she glammed up. As Humphries told the Observer: “I put her in a box after a while. And then later, when I took her out again, she seemed to have become a bit brighter. She started to wear diamanté glasses and her hair was an implausible mauve colour.”
In later years, Humphries’ views on transgender people lost him some admirers in the comedy world. In 2019, the Melbourne international comedy festival, an event he had helped launch in 1987, decided to drop his name from the main prize. Speaking in 2016, he had described gender reassignment surgery as “self-mutilation” – comments which he later claimed were misinterpreted. When the comic Hannah Gadsby accepted the Barry award in 2017, she dissociated herself from Humphries.
Other performers paying tribute to Humphries this weekend included actor Reece Shearsmith, who marked the passing of a “brilliant comic mind” that was also “so sly and so terrifying”, and his former League of Gentlemen colleague Mark Gatiss, who offered the only appropriate farewell: “Goodnight, possum”.
• This article was amended on 24 April 2023 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to Peter Cook as “Private Eye founder”. Cook was not involved in setting up the magazine, which launched in October 1961, but he purchased a substantial stake in it in May 1962.
