Steve On Broadway (SOB)

Barry Humphries is not only a successful character actor in Europe and Australia, but one of Australia’s best-loved landscape painters. His pictures are in 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 exhibition – exhibitions in anarchy and visual satire. These have become part of Australian folklore. After writing and performing songs and sketches in University revues, Humphries joined the newly formed Melbourne Theatre Company.

In 1955, he created Mrs. Norm Everage, a Melbourne housewife who has subsequently become internationally celebrated and has evolved into the hugely popular and universally adored Dame Edna. In Sydney, in the late 50s, Humphries joined the Phillip 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, he 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! (SOB: This is the current home to the West End revival of Guys And Dolls.) Phil Collins played the Artful Dodger in this production. Between West End engagements, he regularly returned to Australia with a new one-man offering, presenting a wide range of characters including Edna, whose popularity was fast developing.

In the early 1970s, with his friend, Bruce Beresford ("Breaker Morant," "Driving Miss Daisy"), Humphries brought to the cinema the character of Barry Mackenzie, a personage he had invented in the Sixties in a cult comic strip he wrote for Peter Cook’s satirical magazine Private Eye. By the mid-70s Humphries was not only playing character roles in British films, plays and television shows, but starring in his own one-man show at the Apollo Theatre in London (SOB: this was where I saw my very first Broadway show in 1979 in the West End version of Annie).

Housewife Superstar! Took London by storm, dominated by Dame Edna and
Les Patterson, and his favorite theatrical invention, the suburban ghost Alexander (Sandy) Stone. He has been presenting his own shows in the West End ever since, culminating in Edna, The Spectacle at the historic Theatre Royal Haymarket. 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 honours for stage and television work, including the Rose d’Or de 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. In 2000, he won a Special Tony Award for his Broadway show and a Special Achievement Award from the Outer Critics’ Circle and his last Broadway offering Back With A Vengeance (2005) won a Tony Nomination.

Humphries has toured in Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and in the Far and Middle East, and extensively in the United State (sic). He has recorded Dame Edna television specials for the BBC, London Weekend TV, NBC and Fox networks. Dr. Humphries is the author of innumerable novels, autobiographies, poetry and one-man plays.

His autobiography My Gorgeous Life 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 Civilisation by John Lahr.

His second volume of autobiography My Life As Me won popular and critical acclaim in Australia and the UK.

He was given the popular Order of Australia in 1982 and was endowed with an Honorary Doctorate of Griffith University (Australia) in 1994 and a Doctorate of Law at his Alma Mater, Melbourne University in 2003.

He is married to Lizzie Spender, the daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender, and has two sons and two daughters.