AustLit

(Introduction)

'Famous Artist Barry Humphries bares all in new Australian show

'Celebrated Australian performer Barry Humphries AO, CBE will take Australian audiences on a revelatory trip through his colourful life and theatrical career when he tours Australia in May 2018 with Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask.

'In an intimate, confessional evening – seasoned with highly personal, sometimes startling, and occasionally outrageous stories – Australia’s best loved entertainer will be peeling off his mask to introduce the man behind the clown.

'For more than 60 years, Humphries has held a mirror to Australia and Australians, revealing their virtues, their foibles, their triumphs and their failings through a gallery of adored characters, including Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Paterson and Sandy Stone.' (Production summary) 

'“I  hope there won’t be any colloquialisms in this fillum Barry”, said Tom Stubbings breathlessly. The senior Sydney accountant had bounded across the tarmac at Kingsford-Smith aerodrome to catch us before we boarded the flight to London to start filming The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. The director, Bruce Beresford, and I were co-authors of the screenplay, and Mr Stubbings was charged with administering the total production budget of $250,000 advanced to us by the ­Australian Film Corporation. He was nervous. Naturally I reassured him: “It’s a family film, Tom”, I said, lying through my teeth. When the film was released on October 12, 1972, and returned its total investment to the AFC in a matter of weeks, it was, notwithstanding, excoriated by every critic, journalist and disc jockey in Australia as a vulgar calumny, a cruel mis­representation of Australian refinement. The movie was a ceaseless stream of colloquialisms new, obsolete and invented. It was the filthiest Australian film of the year, the nadir of Australian cinema which had by then entered its soft-focus “idyllic” phase.'  (Introduction)

'In this unauthorised biography, acquired for an unprecedented advance and in spectacular secrecy, long-time manager and the man who was there from the very beginning, Barry Humphries takes a behind-the-scenes, no-holds-barred look at an icon of our times - Dame Edna Everage. Superstar, swami, confidante and advisor to royalty, Hollywood stars and international political leaders, Dame Edna's life has catapulted her far from her humble Moonee Ponds beginnings as a suburban housewife to the most elite social and artistic circles in the world.

'Who would have thought that this modest Australian woman could achieve so much from London to Louisiana to New York to Tokyo? Who could have anticipated her global fame? Barry Humphries certainly didn't.' (From the publisher's website.)