Australian comedian and actor best known for his creations Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, has died aged 89
in Kew, Melbourne, in 1934, as a child he loved dress-ups and acting. The eldest child of working-class parents, his “boring” childhood in the leafy suburb of Camberwell was spent “disguising myself as different characters”.
As a teenager he became a lover of literature, theatre and art, all feeding into his first sustained character, Dr Aaron Azimuth, a cloaked dandy and dadaist. He attended Melbourne University but never graduated, leaving to make his theatrical debut at Melbourne’s Union theatre in 1953. In the late 1980s, Everage landed her own talkshow in Britain, The Dame Edna Experience, delighting audiences in irreverent and waspish interviews with celebrities; in the 1990s Humphries took the format to the US, launching Dame Edna’s Hollywood. Giving interviews as Edna, she would claim that Barry Humphries was her manager, and he even wrote several books as her, including the 1989 autobiography, My Gorgeous Life: the Life, the Loves, the Legend.
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