Dame Edna Everage  

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Dame Edna Everage is a character created and played by Australian dadaist performer and comedian, Barry Humphries. Famous for her lilac-coloured hair or "wisteria hue" and cat eye glasses or "face furniture," her favorite flower, the gladiola (or "gladies") and her boisterous greeting: "Hello Possums!" As Dame Edna, Humphries has written several books including an autobiography, My Gorgeous Life, appeared in several films and hosted several television shows (on which Humphries has also appeared as himself and other alter-egos).

Humphries has regularly updated Edna, originally a drab Melbourne, Australia housewife satirising the conservatism of Australian suburbia, the character adopted an increasingly outlandish wardrobe after being performed in London in the 1960s, and grew in stature and popularity. Following film appearances and an elevation to damehood in the 1970s, the character evolved to "Housewife and Superstar", then "Megastar" and finally "Gigastar". She came into her own during the 1980s when the often brutal policies of Thatcherism--the "vindictive style of the times"--allowed Dame Edna to sharpen her observations accordingly. Taking Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's seemingly hypocritical motto of "caring and compassion" for others and turning it on its head, Edna became the voice of Humphries' outrage. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Dame Edna became increasingly known and popular in the U.S. after multiple stage and television appearances.

Edna describes her chat-shows as "an intimate conversation between two friends, one of whom is a lot more interesting than the other" (by which she means herself). The character has been used to satirise the cult of celebrity, class snobbery, and prudishness. Her larger-than-life persona and scathing but dead-on commentary on society and celebrity-hood, as well as her habit of treating celebrities like ordinary people (on her TV shows) and ordinary people like celebrities (in her stage shows) have become signatures.

Although Humphries freely states that Edna is a character he plays, Edna herself consistently denies being a fictional character, and refers to Humphries as her "entrepreneur" or manager. Humphries and his staff of assistants and writers only refer to Edna as "she," and "her," never mixing the character with Humphries himself. It is this precision and richness of identity which gives Dame Edna her unique force as a character.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Dame Edna Everage" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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