Made-up Melbourne housewife with a wig and lilac rinse who became a superstar

Nothing like it had been seen before: a somewhat chunky figure in a tight glittery robe who presented herself as Dame Edna Everage – a goofy matrona with voyante butterfly glasses. Lavish ear studs, a lilac rinse wig and a malicious grin on her fleshy face. She was the creation of Australian comedian Barry Humphries, who died Saturday in a Sydney hospital after falling in his home and undergoing hip surgery. He was 89 years old.

Humphries has not performed as Dame Edna since 2012. It had been nice, he said. The pinnacle of his fame dates back to the 1980s and 1990s. Dame Edna was his great asset and even formed the center of his own talk show for the BBC (The Dame Edna Experience) in which he usually had the highest word. The guests – often from the highest echelons of international show business – loved to play along. But his ability to improvise always made him laugh the most. Those shows occasionally also appeared on Dutch television.

Ladies in suburbia

Barry Humphries based his hilarious Dame Edna on the ladies who in the 1950s in suburbia Melbourne had their own clubs to learn about speakers, plays and musical performances. As a youth member of traveling theater companies that performed in such clubs, he knew that milieu inside out. But a career as an actor went wrong. And a one-man show, in which he played grotesque parody of such ladies, also enjoyed little success. He received little recognition for it outside Melbourne.

After many other attempts at a career in the arts, Humphries moved to London in 1959, at the age of 25 – penniless. He managed to win a few theater and musical roles and wrote texts for a comic strip in the satirical magazine Private Eye, about a noisy and overdrinking Australian who tries to keep his head above water in London. He later admitted that the strip contained a lot of autobiographical elements. But the great success again failed to materialize.

Second character

In the mid-1960s he returned to Australia, where he slowly but surely appealed to a wider audience with his theatrical performances. Dame Edna gradually became the main character. He touted her as “a housewife turned superstar.” And in addition to her, he also came up with a second character: Les Patterson, an Australian diplomat who mainly brought up filth due to excessive drinking.

Les Patterson remained a regular figure in his theater shows, but Dame Edna was always the absolute star of the evening. This was also the case in 1994, when Humphries performed in a crowded theater Carré in Amsterdam. At one point, Dame Edna turned to a visitor in the front row, looked at her dress, and said, “That sure is an old favourite.” Yeah, they don’t make them like that anymore these days.’ And no one got mad, because Dame Edna could say anything. That grin made up for everything.