News.BBC.co.uk – By Simon Hancock – BBC News Magazine
Barry Humphries, the man behind the butterfly glasses of Dame Edna Everage, turns 75 this week. But what is it about the lilac-haired international “gigastar” that has proven so enduring?
Dame Edna once described her show as “like an intimate conversation between two friends, one of whom is a lot more interesting than the other.”
For 54 years now, ever since the “average Australian housewife”, Mrs Norm Everage, appeared in a Melbourne comedy revue in 1955, her rampant ego has grown and strutted on the world’s stage, cutting her audiences to shreds with her merciless one-liners.