Tony Award-winning comic Barry Humphries, internationally famend for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven many years, has died. He was 89.
His dying was confirmed Saturday by the Sydney hospital the place he spent a number of days with issues following hip surgical procedure.
Humphries had lived in London for many years and returned to native Australia in December for Christmas.
He instructed The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper final month that his physiotherapy had been “agony” following his fall and hip alternative.
“It was essentially the most ridiculous factor, like all home incidents are. I used to be reaching for a e-book, my foot received caught on a rug or one thing, and down I went,” Humphries mentioned of his fall.
Humphries has remained an energetic entertainer, touring Britain final yr along with his one-man present “The Man Behind the Masks.”
The character of Dame Edna started as a dowdy Mrs. Norm Everage, who first took to the stage in Humphries’ hometown of Melbourne within the mid-Fifties. She mirrored a postwar suburban inertia and cultural blandness that Humphries discovered stifling.
Edna is considered one of Humphries’ a number of enduring characters. The subsequent most well-known is Sir Les Patterson, an ever-drunk, matted and lecherous Australian cultural attache.
Patterson mirrored a notion of Australia as a Western cultural wasteland that drove Humphries together with many main Australian intellectuals to London.
Humphries, a legislation faculty dropout, discovered main success as an actor, author and entertainer in Britain within the Seventies, however america was an ambition that he discovered stubbornly elusive.
A excessive level in america was a Tony Award in 2000 for his Broadway present “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour.”
Married 4 occasions, he’s survived by his spouse Lizzie Spender and 4 kids.