After Dinner Speakers: Barry Humphries, Bad Manners, Diarmuid Gavin

Dr. Humphries is not only a successful character actor in Europe and Australia, but also one of Australia's best-loved landscape painters. His pictures are in innumerable private and public collections, both in his homeland and abroad. He was educated at the University of Melbourne, where he studied law, philosophy, and fine arts. It was at the University of Melbourne where he held his first Dada exhibitions - experiments in anarchy and visual satire. These have become a part of Australian folklore. After writing and performing songs and sketches in University revues, Humphries joined the newly formed Melbourne Theatre Company. In 1956, he created the character of Mrs. Everage, a Melbourne housewife who has subsequently become internationally celebrated, and has evolved into the hugely popular Dame Edna. In Sydney in the late '50s, Humphries joined the Philip Street Revue Theatre, Australia's first home for intimate revue and satirical comedy. After a long season in which he developed his newly invented characters, Humphries appeared as Estragon in Waiting for Godot. This production marked Australia's first ever production of a Samuel Beckett play. In 1959, Humphries sailed to Venice. During the '60s in London, Barry Humphries appeared in numerous West End productions. Most notable were the musicals Oliver! and Maggie May by Lionel Bart, and stage/radio productions by his friend Spike Milligan, in particular The Bed Sitting Room. He also worked in productions with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East, and played Long John Silver at the Mermaid Theatre. In 1967 he starred as Fagin in the Piccadilly Theatre's revival of Oliver! with Phil Collins playing The Artful Dodger. Between West End engagements he regularly returned to Australia with a new one-man show, presenting a wide range of characters, including one female character, Edna, whose popularity was fast developing. In the early 1970s, with his friend, director Bruce Beresford ("Driving Miss Daisy"), Humphries brought to the cinema the character of Barry Mackenzie, a character he had invented in the '60s in a cult comic strip he wrote for Peter Cook's satirical magazine Private Eye. By the mid-70s Humphries was no longer playing character roles in British films, plays and television shows, but starring in his own one-man show at the Apollo Theatre in London. Housewife Superstar!, dominated by Dame Edna, took London by storm. He has been presenting his own shows in the West End ever since, culminating in Edna, The Spectacle at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, arguably the most beautiful theatre in Europe. In 1979, Humphries won the Society of West End Theatres Award for A Night with Dame Edna at the Piccadilly Theatre. Since then, he has collected innumerable honors for stage and television work, including the Rose d'Orde Montreux in 1991 for his television show, "A Night on Mount Edna," and a Sir Peter Ustinov Endowment, for his life work as an entertainer, at the Banff Television Festival in 1997. He has toured in Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and in the Far and Middle East, and recorded Dame Edna television specials for the NBC and Fox networks. Dr. Humphries is the author of several books, novels, autobiographies, poetry and plays. His autobiography More, Please won the J.R. Ackerley prize for biography in 1993, and he is the subject of two critical and biographical studies: The Real Barry Humphries by Peter Coleman, and Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization by John Lahr. He was given the Order of Australia in 1982, and was endowed with an Honorary Doctorate of Griffith University (Australia) in 1994. He is married to Lizzie Spender, the daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender, and has two sons and two daughters.