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More Please: An Autobiography

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In September 1957, Humphries appeared as Estragon in Waiting for Godot, in Australia's first production of the Samuel Beckett play at the Arrow Theatre in Melbourne directed by Peter O'Shaughnessy who played Vladimir.

Like The Dame Edna Experience, these included an array of top celebrity guests such as Burt Reynolds, Cher, Bea Arthur, Kim Basinger and Barry Manilow. Humphries was also the subject of numerous portraits by artist friends, including Clifton Pugh (1958, National Portrait Gallery [102]) and John Brack (in the character of Edna Everage, 1969, Art Gallery of New South Wales [103]). It polarised British critics but was successful enough to lead to a short-lived BBC television series, The Barry Humphries Scandals.John Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, best known for his on-stage and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage, a Melbourne housewife and "gigastar", and Sir Les Patterson, Australia's foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. As Humphries aged, he no longer required makeup for the part, and played Sandy in his own dressing gown. Nostalgic, the book reveals much about a man who has kept his private life private, overshadowed by, among others, his most monstrous creation, Dame Edna Everage.

Humphries was the author of many books, including two autobiographies, two novels and a treatise on Chinese drama in the goldfields. He wrote and starred in ABC-TV's The Life and Death of Sandy Stone (1991), and presented the ABC social history series Barry Humphries' Flashbacks (1998). In 2016, he appeared in a dual role in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie as Charlie, a rich former lover of Patsy Stone, and in a nonspeaking cameo as Dame Edna.

He became a friend of leading members of the British comedy scene including Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Spike Milligan, Willie Rushton and fellow Australian expatriate comedian-actors John Bluthal and Dick Bentley. The Dadaist pranks and performances he mounted in Melbourne were experiments in anarchy and visual satire which have become part of Australian folklore.

He was one of the many friends who tried in vain to help Peter Cook, who himself eventually died from alcohol-related illnesses. His other television shows and one-off specials include Dame Edna's Neighbourhood Watch (1992), Dame Edna's Work Experience (1996), Dame Edna Kisses It Better (1997) and Dame Edna's Hollywood (1991–92), a series of three chat-show specials filmed in the U. Humphries described this schooling, in a Who's Who entry, as "self-educated, attended Melbourne Grammar School". Sir Les was the polar opposite of Dame Edna; she a culturally aspirational Protestant from Melbourne and he a culture-free Roman Catholic from Sydney.He at one time had the largest private collection of the paintings of Charles Conder in the world [100] and he was a great admirer of the Flemish symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever, relishing his role as 'President for Life' of the De Boever Society. In 1958, Humphries and O'Shaughnessy collaborated on and appeared in the Rock'n'Reel Revue at the New Theatre in Melbourne where Humphries brought the characters of Mrs Everage and Sandy Stone into the psyche of Melbourne audiences. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, followed in 1981 by his part as the fake-blind TV-show host Bert Schnick in Shock Treatment, the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. During this period Humphries was living near Bondi and while out walking one day he had a chance meeting with an elderly man who had a high, scratchy voice and a pedantic manner of speech; this encounter inspired the creation of another of Humphries' most enduring characters, Sandy Stone.

This best-selling book moves from suburban Australia of the 1930s, 40s and 50s to Humphries' international stardom, and his revelations and confessions will astonish his vast audience, being so wildly at odds with all that has gone before. Now retired, he is married to Lizzie Spender, the daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender, and has two sons and two daughters. When Humphries was a guest on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme in 2009, he made the following choices: " Mir ist die Ehre widerfahren" from Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier; Gershwin's "Things are Looking Up" sung by Fred Astaire; "Love Song" composed by Josef Suk; "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" sung by Randolph Sutton; " Der Leiermann" from Schubert's Winterreise song cycle; the 2nd movement of Poulenc's Flute Sonata; Mischa Spoliansky's " Auf Wiedersehen"; and "They are not long the weeping and the laughter" from Delius' Songs of Sunset. Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization: Backstage with Barry Humphries by John Lahr.

Humphries' character, Sandy Stone, was an elderly Australian man, either single or married with a daughter who died as a child. Humphries said in 2016 that "slowly the character has deepened, so I begin to understand and appreciate him, and finally feel myself turning into him".

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