Barry Humphries

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Barry Humphries (2001)

John Barry Humphries , AO , CBE (born February 17, 1934 in Melbourne ) is an Australian comedian , satirist , character actor and drag queen . He became world famous with his fictional character Dame Edna Everage .

Life

He is particularly known for his stage and television alter ego Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife, and for Sir Les Patterson , a cultural attaché sent from Australia to the United Kingdom. Humphries is also a film producer and script writer , a star of musical theater in London's West End , an award-winning writer and an excellent landscape painter .

Humphrie's characters, especially Dame Edna Everage, have brought him international renown, and he has appeared in numerous films, stage productions, and television shows.

Humphries got married four times. His fourth wife, Lizzie Spender, is the daughter of British writer Stephen Spender . He has two daughters from his second marriage to Rosalind Tong and two sons from his third marriage to Diane Millstead.

Act

His Barry McKenzie comic strips about Australians in London appeared in Private Eye magazine with drawings by Nicholas Garland.

Humphries was also the original voice of Bruce the Shark in the 2003 Pixar film Finding Nemo , as well as the narrator voice in Mary & Max - or: Do sheep shrink when it rains? , a 2009 Australian clay animation film directed by Adam Elliot .

In the 2012 first part of Peter Jackson's film adaptation of JRR Tolkien's book The Hobbit , he took on the role of the Great Goblin.

Other works

Humphries is the author of many books, including a. of two autobiographies and two novels. He also wrote various pieces and has made dozens of recordings. His first autobiography, More Please , won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Biographies in 1993.

  • Bizarre . Compilation. London: Elek Books, 1965.
  • Barry Humphries' Book of Innocent Austral Verse . Anthology. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1968.
  • Bazza Pulls It Off !: More Adventures of Barry McKenzie . Melbourne: Sun Books, 1971.
  • The Wonderful World of Barry MacKenzie . With Nicholas Garland; a comic strip. London: Private Eye / Andre Deutsch, 1971.
  • Barry McKenzie Holds His Own . Photoplay with Bruce Beresford . Melbourne: Sun Books, 1974.
  • Dame Edna's Coffee Table Book: A guide to gracious living and the finer things of life by one of the first ladies of world theater . Compendium. Sydney: Sphere Books, 1976.
  • Les Patterson's Australia . Melbourne: Sun Books, 1978.
  • Bazza Comes Into His Own: The Final Fescennine Farago of Barry McKenzie, Australia's first working-class hero - with learned and scholarly appendices and a new enlarged glossary . With Nicholas Garland. Melbourne, Sun Books, 1979.
  • The Sound of Edna: Dame Edna's Family Songbook . With Nick Rowley. London: Chappell, 1979.
  • A Treasury of Australian Kitsch . Melbourne: Macmillan, 1980.
  • A Nice Night's Entertainment: Sketches and Monologues 1956-1981 . A retrospective. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981.
  • Dame Edna's Bedside Companion . Compendium. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982.
  • Punch down under . London: Robson Books, 1984.
  • The Complete Barry McKenzie . Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.
  • Shades of Sandy Stone . Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1989. Limited Edition.
  • My gorgeous life . As Edna Everage. London: Macmillan, 1989.
  • More Please . Autobiography. London, New York, Ringwood, Toronto, and Auckland: Viking, 1992.
  • The Life and Death of Sandy Stone . Sydney: Macmillan, 1990.
  • Neglected Poems and Other Creatures . Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991.
  • Women in the Background . Novel. Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1995.
  • Barry Humphries' Flashbacks: The book of the acclaimed TV series . Sydney and London: HarperCollins, 1999.
  • My Life As Me . Autobiography. London: Michael Joseph, 2002.

Humphries was the object of three critical and biographical studies:

  • The Real Barry Humphries by Peter Coleman. London: Coronet Books, 1991.
  • Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries by John Lahr . New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1992.
  • A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry Humphries by Paul Matthew St. Pierre. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004.

Barry Humphries wrote the one-man show Edna - The Spectacle (1998) , among others .

Awards

Web links

Commons : Barry Humphries  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. rp online: Humphries plays the Great Goblin
  2. It's an Honor. Australian Government, accessed July 23, 2010 .