Dame Edna Everage bids 57-year stage career adieu

Dame Edna Everage, back from whatever royal soiree she has most recently graced to announce ''that's all, possums''. After 56 years on the stage (and film and TV and even, occasionally, record), she's calling it a day.
''I feel quite old when you mention that,'' says Edna, when reminded — as if it were necessary — how long it has been since she made her stage debut in a Melbourne University revue in December 1955.
''It's been a journey,'' she adds. ''It began in Melbourne and I'll be achieving closure in Melbourne with this beautiful show. But it will linger in people's minds, like a virus.''


At 78, Humphries said the time had come to retire all his various alter egos from the stage, the most famous of whom is Dame Edna.


“She’s a little weary of touring and strange hotels,” Humphries told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in Canberra, explaining his most enduring character’s decision to retire.


Another of Humphries’ characters, drunken Australian cultural attache Sir Les Patterson, will join Dame Edna on the farewell tour.


Dame Edna’s career began as the more dour Mrs. Edna Everage when she first stepped onto the stage of a Melbourne University review in 1955 in Humphries’ hometown of Melbourne.


She was “Auntie Edna” in the 1974 Australian comedy movie “Barry McKenzie Holds His Own,” in which she was made a dame — a British title that is the female equivalent of a knighthood — as part of the plot during a cameo appearance by the then-Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.


Dame Edna was a staple of television and stage in Britain and Australia before Humphries won a Tony Award in 2000 for his Broadway show “Dame Edna, The Royal Tour.” Its sequel, “Dame Edna, Back with a Vengeance,” was also nominated for a Tony, the leading U.S. theater award, in 2004.