Died at 92
male
John Barry Humphries, AO, CBE (17 February 1934 - 22 April 2023) was an Australian comedian, satirist, dadaist, artist, author and character actor, perhaps 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. James's. He was a film producer and script writer, a star of London's West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an accomplished landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not only the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin. Humphries' characters, especially Dame Edna Everage, have brought him international renown, and he had appeared in numerous films, stage productions and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Edna had evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom, the gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally feted Housewife Gigastar, Dame Edna Everage. Humphries' other major satirical character creation was the archetypal Australian bloke Barry McKenzie, who originated as the hero of a comic strip about Australians in London (with drawings by Nicholas Garland) which was first published in Private Eye magazine. The stories about "Bazza" (Humphries' nickname, as well as an Australian term of endearment for the name Barry) gave wide circulation to Australian slang, particularly jokes about drinking and its consequences (much of which was invented by Humphries), and the character went on to feature in two Australian films, in which he was portrayed by Barry Crocker. Humphries' other satirical characters include the "priapic and inebriated cultural attaché" Sir Les Patterson, who has "continued to bring worldwide discredit upon Australian arts and culture, while contributing as much to the Australian vernacular as he has borrowed from it", gentle, grandfatherly "returned gentleman" Sandy Stone, iconoclastic 1960s underground film-maker Martin Agrippa, Paddington socialist academic Neil Singleton, sleazy trade union official Lance Boyle, high-pressure art salesman Morrie O'Connor and failed tycoon Owen Steele. Humphries died following complications from hip surgery at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney on 22 April 2023.
It is twenty-thousand years ago. The Earth is a wondrous, prehistoric world filled with danger, not the least of which is the beginning of the Ice Age. To avoid a really bad frostbite, the planet's majestic creatures - and a few small, slothful ones - begin migrating south. The exceptions are a woolly mammoth named Manfred, and a terminally lazy sloth named Sid. When Sid "adopts" Manfred as his protector, the mammoth tries everything he can to unload his newfound baggage. But that's only the beginning of his frustrations: Manny has been roped by Sid into helping reunite an abandoned human baby named Roshan with his family. They are joined by Diego, a sinister saber-toothed tiger who befriends Sid and Manny, all the while seeing the infant as a tasty treat. As Sid, Manny and Diego make their way across the vast, ice-covered landscape, another creature, a prehistoric squirrel/rat known as Scrat, tries desperately to carry out his mission in life - to bury an acorn - which, alas, triggers calamitous events.
