Remembering Barry Humphries, art lover, artist and creator of Dame Edna Everage, who has died, aged 89

Barry Humphries, the celebrated Australian satirist and creator of the immortal tv and stage comedian characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, has died, aged 89.

Along with his stellar profession as a author, actor, and tv performer and host, Humphries was a champion of museums, libraries and the humanities on the whole, a collector of latest artwork, an enthusiastic beginner painter, the co-creator of the influential Nineteen Sixties sketch Barry McKenzie, and a prodigious connoisseur and acquirer of fin-de-siècle artists and authors. He was additionally a vivid memoirist and a critical bibliophile with an excellent information of books of the Eighteen Nineties.

Humphries discovered world fame by means of tv appearances within the UK and later the US, and thru the comedian characters he created, and performed, to lampoon the foibles of conservative Australians of his dad and mom’ generations—the warm-hearted, fashion-loving and scurrilous Dame Edna Everage in more and more baroque rhinestone-heavy spectacles; the grotesque and politically incorrect “cultural attaché” Sir Les Patterson, meals spilling liberally from between his jutting, snaggled, tooth; and his most haunting creation, the mournful warfare veteran Sandy Stone “rambling on”, as Humphries put it, “about an Australia that not exists”.

Conserving his numerous comedian personae in concord for the previous half-century grew to become an act of efficiency artwork for Humphries. The Edna character was created for a Melbourne revue in 1955, and “broke” London in 1976 with the Housewife Famous person! stage present—calling her visitor and viewers “possums” and throwing gladioli into the auditorium—earlier than (lastly) repeating the magic in New York on the finish of the century. Humphries used to check with himself as Dame Edna’s “supervisor”, and Humphries as Edna had a working gag about how a lot cash Humphries had made as her “impresario”—all the things all the time within the third individual.

In an early BBC mockumentary, La Dame aux Gladiolas (1979), Edna declares that Humphries had “trussed me up like a hen on this contract”, likening their relationship to that of the Ballets Russes director Sergei Diaghilev and the star male dancer Nijinsky. “He’s acquired used to a number of the little luxuries that my fame has introduced… him.”

When interlocutors grew to become (understandably) caught up within the advanced interaction of his a number of skilled personalities, Humphries reminded them that it was all an act, and that he had the good pleasure of being within the “cheering up” enterprise.

Humphries was periodically topic to public campaigns again house that declared his satire to be “unhealthy for Australia”—certainly the primary two McKenzie compilation volumes, The Great World of Barry McKenzie (1968), and Bazza Pulls It Off! (1971), have been banned in Australia as a result of they have been thought-about, as Humphries put it, “demeaning to Australia’s nationwide picture as a pleasant nation”—however he was latterly a commemorated determine, regarded by many as the daddy of half a century of Aussie comedy. (In 2005 Humphries as Dame Edna featured within the hit comedy present Kath and Kim, whose most pointed characters—two Melbourne homeware retailer vendeuses with exaggerated vowels and aspirations to vacation within the good Queensland resort of “Noooosa”—delivered a scrumptious lineal homage to Edna, half a century after Humphries first introduced the character in Melbourne on 19 December 1955 in an “Olympic hostess” sketch within the revue Return Fare.)

Humphries was a good friend and common lunching associate of one other formidable Australian dame, the late Elisabeth Murdoch, matriarch of the publishing dynasty, whose son Rupert Murdoch noticed Humphries as “the unique article”. To journey with Humphries in Australia lately was to witness the parting of crowds as if for a Commonwealth tour carried out by the late Queen Elizabeth II (a favorite fantasy foil in a few of Dame Edna‘s extra extravagant monologues). “It was solely after lengthy expatriation and a number of other marriages,” Humphries wrote within the Each day Telegraph in 2021, “that I started to essentially love Australia.” His loss of life was a nationwide occasion Down Underneath with discuss of a day of nationwide mourning and humanities awards in his identify.

One of the crucial hanging parts of the social media response to his loss of life was the proof—with individuals recounting memorable first-meeting conversations with Humphries on topics starting from “Biedermeier glass” to “the ‘degenerate music’ suppressed by the Third Reich“—of how a lot he used his broad appreciation of the humanities to attach with individuals from each artistic stroll of life.

From Beardsley to Barry McKenzie

The Barry McKenzie sketch that Humphries created with the New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland for the satirical journal Non-public Eye was one of many defining graphic artwork creations of the Nineteen Sixties. Humphries had moved to London from his native Melbourne in 1959, to additional his nascent performing profession, and fell in with the Footlights era of comedians, together with Peter Cook dinner, founder proprietor in 1961 of Non-public Eye, and Jonathan Miller. The title character, a lantern-jawed boorish Aussie visiting London and going through the condescension of the “house nation” sorts, grew to become the topic of a strip that ran from 1964 to the top of the last decade, of three guide compilations and two movies directed in Australia by Bruce Beresford, one other of the Australians of all the abilities who had come to postwar London to additional their careers—they included the writers Germaine Greer and Clive James, the artwork critic Robert Hughes, and their generational senior the artist Sidney Nolan.

Humphries’s information of artists of the Eighteen Nineties and 1900s bore fruit in BBC tv documentaries of the late Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. The primary was on the English-born painter Charles Conder (1868-1909), who did his greatest en plein air work in his Australian Impressionist part in Sydney and Melbourne. Humphries, who as soon as owned the biggest non-public assortment of Conder’s work, described him as “an exquisitely insipid Eighteen Nineties artist who passionately me”. The movie included footage shot in a suburb of Manchester as a result of, as Humphries remembered, “consultant works by this artist” have been “obscurely hung at… the Whitworth Gallery”.

The second documentary was A Summer time Sideshow (1977) on artists—together with Conder, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Walter Sickert and Ernest Dowson—who gathered within the Normandy sea port of Dieppe on the flip of the Twentieth century. Throughout filming, Humphries—who suffered all through his life from “an acquisitive streak”—noticed “a reasonably enticing artwork deco light-fitting by Daum [crystal] forlornly hanging in a desuetudinous lavatory” of an deserted constructing in Dieppe. “A 12 months later,” he remembered in a memoir of his good friend Julian Jebb, who directed the Conder and Dieppe movies, “I despatched Julian a polaroid {photograph} of the ‘liberated’ lampshade with the eccentric roof of the Opera Home seen within the background.”

The Dieppe glass lampshade anecdote captures a number of the important markers of the Humphries fashion: the expatriate lexicon-ransacking aesthete who returned recurrently to his homeland, by no means shedding his connection to the Australian Zeitgeist (Humphries as Dame Edna as soon as wore a Sydney Opera Home hat to Royal Ascot); who thrived on discovering rarities or absurdities in all genres; and whose usually recondite literary and bibliographical passions (the inclusion of Wilde and Beardsley) have been as strongly held as his abiding concern for artwork and artists, dwelling and useless.

The Camberwell little one prodigy

Humphries was born in 1934, and grew up in Camberwell, an prosperous suburb of British-centric Nineteen Thirties Melbourne. His father was a profitable builder and architect and one among Barry’s grandfathers had emigrated to Australia from Lancashire. He was a precocious, intellectually inquisitive, schoolboy—”approach past his age group” as one among his lecturers at Camberwell Grammar remembered—whose skills have been indulged by his dad and mom. When he evinced a ardour for shopkeeping his father constructed him a a miniature store; when his eye turned to chemistry his father obliged with a child-sized laboratory. For his twelfth birthday he elected to affix the Put up-Impressionists and describes in his memoir My Life as Me (2002) persuading his dad and mom to purchase him the Phaidon books on Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gaugin. Duly impressed, he graduated from portray his mom’s brightly colored backyard, to creating easel work of the native shoreline, heavy with pigment utilized with a palette knife.

An early cloud over this home bliss got here when his mom gave his prize illustrated books to a “good man” from the Salvation Military to promote for charity. “However you have learn them,” his mom countered when he objected. For the remainder of his life, Humphries mentioned on an Australian chat present in 2003, he had been looking for them. (By the point of his loss of life he had a group of over 25,000 books in his London home, the library of a critical bibliophile robust in ghost tales and late Nineteenth-century and early Twentieth-century British and Australian authors.)

Darker household clouds gathered after Humphries confirmed his first indicators of revolt when a pupil on the austere and hearty Melbourne Grammar—sporting for the primary time his trademark floppy Wildean fringe—and when he uncared for his research first in school after which at Melbourne College (the place he had received a scholarship) to commit himself to Dadaist pranks and performing. He had turn out to be stagestruck on the age of 14 after seeing Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Thornton Wilder’s The Pores and skin of our Tooth in the course of the Outdated Vic Theatre Firm’s 1948 tour of Australia.

Humphries was “shattered” by his once-adoring mom’s disapproval, and the genteel Philistinism of the Humphries dad and mom and their Camberwell circle grew to become a right away and long-term supply for his seven many years as a satirist.

Humphries first “met” his creation Edna Everage on 19 December 1955 after showing in a touring Union Theatre repertory firm manufacturing of Twelfth Night time, as Orsino to Zoe Caldwell’s Viola. He had perfected Edna’s harsh, half-throttled falsetto by imagining the gushing thanks that they may anticipate from the girl mayoress, or native “tradition vulture”, on the subsequent small-town cease. On the succeeding Christmas 1955 revue this creation morphed into Edna, “in all probability the dullest [first] identify we may consider”, a girl whose household identify was a phonetic play on “Common”. The half had been supposed for Caldwell, quickly to turn out to be a worldwide famous person herself, and when she couldn’t take it on, it fell again into Humphries’s lap, and remained a part of his skilled dramatic persona for the following 68 years.

Humphries and his second spouse, the dancer Rosalind Tong arrived in London by steamer, and through north Italy, in 1959. The succeeding decade was a difficult one. His Australian monologues didn’t “take” on the Institution Membership, in London, in 1963, with solely Bamber Gascoigne, then theatre critic of The Spectator, staying till the top of his routine. He received the a part of Mr Sowerberry in Lionel Bart’s smash-hit musical Oliver! (and later the lead character Fagin), however his personal act had to date taken off solely in Australia. He was beset on the time by private demons: bouts of melancholy pushed by his rising dependence on alcohol. The nadir got here in 1970 when, again in Melbourne for therapy for melancholy and drink, he awakened on a bit of wasteland, badly crushed up, and was arrested for public intoxication. He gave up drink—remaining sober for the remainder of his life—and the post-drink Edna and, later, Les Patterson, grew to become his passports to a half-century on the head of his career.

“I put her in a field after some time,” he mentioned to The Observer of Edna Everage. “After which later, after I took her out once more, she appeared to have turn out to be a bit brighter. She began to put on diamanté glasses and her hair was an implausible mauve color.” Humphries’s information of artwork historical past shines by means of in a few of Edna’s high-Philistine malapropisms. In La Dame aux Gladiolas, the 45-year-old Humphries portrays his diva in Norma Desmond mode, however with easel photos in her lodge suite within the method of an Eighteen Nineties Paris saloniste, and a stunning array of tongue-in-cheek absurdities. Edna brandishes a pamphlet on Sigmund Freud’s “forgotten years” in Melbourne. Edward Munch’s—Edna refers to him as “Edward Scream”—The Scream is, she says, set on the harbour bridge in Sydney, painted in the course of the “artist’s two days in Australia” (on different events Edna was recognized to sport a “Scream” gown on stage). Throughout filming, Humphries and his interviewer had incessantly to modify off the recording whereas they collapsed into laughter at their very own jokes.

A ‘cheerful beginner’ artist

Humphries grew as much as be what he known as a “cheerful beginner” landscapist, and painted to the top of his life. The images he painted have been very completely different to these he collected, and If a seller had provided him one among his personal flamboyant works, he wrote in My Life as Me, “I might in all probability by no means converse to them once more.” Regardless of that, examples of his personal work, as much as and together with works made within the mid 2010s, are among the many giant bequests he made to the Barry Humphries Assortment at Arts Centre Melbourne. (Different donations embrace costumes and memorabilia from the Humphries profession together with the 1981 Marsupial Costume, made for Dame Edna’s look on the Joan Rivers Present within the US and latterly exhibited in Dame Edna’s Frock-A-Thon: A Journey from Cardigan to Couture, at Melbourne’s Performing Arts Museum, April-June 1999.)

He was a satisfied bibliophile by the point he arrived in London on the finish of the 50s, after haunting the bookshops and report shops of downtown Melbourne. In London he discovered a wealthy and formidable solid of sellers and hunters of rarities. A privately revealed quantity, At Century’s Ebb (2009), a “Number of Unpublished and Unfamiliar English Prose and Verse from the Flip of the Nineteenth Century” captures a number of the Humphries book-collecting passions properly. A lot of the gathering had not appeared in print however had been found by him “tipped into, or inscribed on the flyleaves of books in my very own library”. They embrace a letter about Aubrey Beardsley’s turning into a Catholic, Beardsley on the Pope’s new encyclical, and the poet-diplomat Rennell Rodd to Oscar Wilde about watching the Boat Race from William Morris’s window. They convey he hopes, “the genuine sensibility of the interval: a chaste classical manner, ill-concealing a smouldering eroticism”.

Humphries had been a member of the Roxburghe Membership, the oldest society of bibliophiles, whose members are largely heirs to the good aristocratic libraries of Britain, since 2011. He was an excellent supporter of libraries, chatting with the Mates of Nationwide Libraries, and Patron of Honour since 2013 of the Worldwide League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB).

The final time I noticed Humphries he got here on a go to in 2015 to see some manuscript letters from one among his literary enthusiasms, the essayist and historian of aesthetics Vernon Lee (1856-1935, pen identify of Violet Paget) to the novelist Maurice Baring (1874-1945)—each of whom had contributed within the Eighteen Nineties to The Yellow E book, a primary Humphries curiosity. Lee—a prodigious expertise recognized for flights of befuddling verbal exposition as extravagant as something within the Humphries comedian repertoire—scored on this event, in her supremely illegible hand, with a 1919 letter assessing Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann (1914). She permits the genius of Proust however finds the second, “jealousy”, part of the guide “brings out… a sure inadequate motility and circulation, a sticky, sea-slug shiny slowness temperamental to the person … a scarcity of shifting alongside—witness Swinburne, Wagner, d’Annunzio. These are the sensual tempers… the individuals who go on sucking & sucking, rolling issues of their mouths; lolling, trailing, and in the case of Proust leaving a not very appetising path behind them.” Matter made, we thought, for the billowing Humphries lexicon.

Humphries was eyes ablaze on the time for his newest artwork historic enthusiasm, a documentary that he and Beresford have been creating on the bequest of work left within the Nineteen Fifties to the Mildura Arts Centre, in rural Victoria between Adelaide and Melbourne, by the newspaper proprietor Robert “R.D.” Elliott, a publishing rival of Keith Murdoch. Whereas in England, Elliott had purchased 50 works by one previous grasp of the British artwork institution, William Orpen, and the same quantity by one other, Frank Brangwyn. Funding for the documentary from the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) was finally not forthcoming, however Beresford and his daughter Cordelia Beresford held on to the dream, making a 30-minute documentary on the topic in 2021.

Humphries produced quite a few books underneath the guise of Dame Edna, Les Patterson and Sandy Shaw—a mixture of monologues and mock memoirs. Underneath his personal identify he produced two superbly written, uproarious and infrequently heartbreaking, autobiographies, Extra Please (1992) and My Life as Me (2002). He additionally left glowing descriptions of encounters with artists, together with a bravura account of sitting for his portrait to David Hockney in California in 2015 who made two drawings and one portray of Humphries.

Humphries liked museums and on the Clive James Present in 1987 mentioned that if the underside fell out of present enterprise he wish to be “a museum attendant in a distant suburb of Brussels devoted to the works of a forgotten Belgian artist” in a museum that was by no means visited. “That might be a peaceable life.” Oscar Humphries, his elder son by his third spouse, the artist Diane Millstead, is a gallerist in London, and the previous editor of Apollo journal.

Late in life, Humphries would possibly flip up at a celebration, the place he already knew half the company, however would nonetheless “do his bit”, taking the difficulty to doff his acquainted fedora and announce “Barry Humphries”. He had an old style courtesy that seen if somebody, whoever they could be, was not included within the coronary heart of a celebration. He was all the time in on the joke, and needed others to affix him in that pleasure. The precocious little one whose dad and mom known as him “Sunny” remained within the “cheering up” enterprise till the top.

Regardless of repeated guarantees of retirement, and remaining excursions—particularly from Dame Edna—Humphries was performing till the ultimate 12 months of his life, launching a brand new act, Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret, in London in 2018. On the conclusion of La Dame aux Gladiolias in 1979, Humphries as Dame Edna is requested if there have been any regrets. The reply—”Je ne regrette reeen”—is adopted by a loud chuckle and fade to black.

John Barry Humphries; born Melbourne, Australia 17 February 1934; Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) 1982; CBE 2007; married 1955 Brenda Wright (marriage dissolved 1957), 1959 Rosalind Tong (two daughters, marriage dissolved 1970), 1979 Diane Millstead (two sons, marriage dissolved 1989), 1990 Lizzie Spender; died Sydney, Australia 22 April 2023.