Australian comedian and actor Barry Humphries was BOTD in 1934. Born in Melbourne, Victoria, he studied at Melbourne University, but left before graduating to pursue an acting career. He made his theatrical debut in 1953 and joined a touring company. In 1955, he debuted the character of Edna Everage, an alarmingly confident and cheerfully condescending middle-class housewife. First performed on Australian television in 1956, Edna became Humphries’ best-known alter ego, attaining the international celebrity status she had always assumed was hers by right. He moved to Sydney in 1957, performing at the Phillip Street Theatre, and appeared in the first Australian production of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. He moved to London in 1959, befriending many of the key figures of the emerging British satirical comedy scene, including Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Spike Milligan, and co-wrote the cartoon strip The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie for satirical magazine Private Eye. He also appeared in West End productions of Lionel Bart‘s musicals Oliver! and Maggie May, and an extremely strange stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island co-starring Milligan. In 1966, he began performing one-man comedy shows for the BBC television series The Late Show, dusting off Edna and other characters. He returned to Australia in 1970 for Edna’s film debut in 1970’s The Naked Bunyip, and starred in a successful film version of his Barry McKenzie comic strip. In 1974, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam informally made Edna a dame. Newly emboldened by her new status, Dame Edna stormed 1970s London in the successful stage shows Housewife, Superstar! and A Night with Dame Edna, becoming famous for her colourful outfits, diamante-studded spectacles, love of gladioli and and ebullient greeting “Hello, Possums!” She attained a global audience with her 1980s TV talk show The Dame Edna Experience, fearlessly skewering celebrity guests in the presence of her stony-faced “New Zealand bridesmaid” Madge Allsop. Humphries also created other comic characters, notably Sir Les Patterson, a lecherous and perennially drunk Australian politician. In later life, he took on unconventionally conventional roles in films including Immortal Beloved, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and voiced Bruce the Shark in the animated film Finding Nemo. He and Edna made their final public appearances in the 2019 stage show Dame Edna: My Gorgeous Life, which toured throughout Australia. Married four times and with four children, Humphries was both ostentatiously bold and mysteriously vague about his personal life, writing multiple memoirs as Dame Edna but waiting until later in life to publish his autobiographies More Please and My Life as Me. In 2018, he was criticised on social media for referring to gender reassignment surgery as “self-mutilation” and transgender identity as “a fashion”, leading to his name being removed from an Australian comedy award. He died in 2023, aged 89, prompting a period of national mourning in Australia. Possibly the queerest straight man who ever lived, he earns Honorary SuperGay Status for a lifetime of razor-sharp comedy and for fearlessly embracing his inner housewife.