Like Charlie Chaplin with Charlot or, more recently, Rowan Atkinson with Mister Bean, Barry Humphries had created, with Lady Edna Everage, a world famous character, in the guise of a modest suburban housewife turned bourgeois with purple hair, self-ennobled and full of herself. But, if the mime talents of the first two made them universal, the Australian actor and stand-up comedian Barry Humphries was known to an admittedly huge but essentially English-speaking audience.
Also the French will have ignored a funny actor, with a legendary repartee, and his largely improvised one-man-show performances. Returning to his native country for the holiday season, Barry Humphries suffered a bad fall in February requiring the replacement of a hip. He was admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney for complications, where he died on April 22, at the age of 89.
Part of his performances and appearances involved getting audience members on stage or showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thus we see Dame Edna settle in the royal box of a London theater, in 2013, alongside Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla Parker Bowles. A security guard comes to exfiltrate him politely, and the undesirable matron to exclaim to the public, hilarious: “They found me a better place…”
In 2002, during the outdoor festivities for the fifty years of reign of Elizabeth II, Dame Edna had warned the queen before the scheduled rock concert: “I warn you, it might be noisy. »
Inspired by his mother
Much appreciated by the royal entourage and the public in the United Kingdom, Barry Humphries had settled in London in 1959, making himself known on the cabaret and theater stages of the country and the capital, then on television. Dame Edna went on to host her own talk shows there, where her guests served as foils to her unfathomable narcissism.
Born in Melbourne on February 17, 1934, the young man with the air of an eccentric dandy, curious and cultured, devoted himself to painting (he then defined himself as a Dadaist) then to the theater within the framework of the Melbourne Theater Company. In 1955, he invented the character of Edna Everage, inspired by his mother, who was to play his compatriot, actress Zoe Caldwell. But this one being unavailable, Humphries cross-dresses. He was far from imagining that Dame Edna would make her fortune and her glory during a career of seventy years.
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