Annette Sharp: Barry Humphries’ wife Lizzie Spender going to King’s coronation

Barry Humphries’ wife Lizzie Spender has accepted a personal invitation from the King to take a coveted seat at Westminster Abbey to bear witness to Charles’s crowning.

The wife of Barry Humphries will represent her late husband at the King’s coronation in London.

English-born Lizzie Spender, Humphries’ fourth wife, has confided to friends her intentions to accept a personal invitation from the King to take a coveted seat at Westminster Abbey to bear witness to Charles’s crowning as monarch.

Humphries had become friendly with the future king over a period of about three decades.

“I always admired (Charles),” Humphries’ friend, film director Bruce Beresford, said he was told by the entertainer in the days before his death this month.

“We always got on well and I really liked his company and enjoyed being with him.”

Barry Humphries and Lizzie Spender in London in 2016. Picture: Getty Images

His characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson were also favourites of Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother.

The daughter of British poet and novelist Stephen Spender, writer/actor Spender saw her father honoured twice by the Queen — once in 1962 when she was about 12 and he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1983 when he was knighted.

Like her father, Spender loves England and was eager to fly home to her West Hampstead home following Humphries’ death two weeks ago.

The couple had become “marooned in Australia”, friends have said, after Humphries’ health quickly deteriorated in February.

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