Barry Humphries’ son Oscar: ‘I was so lucky we had a powerful relationship’
Oscar Humphries says his father Barry taught him about art collecting and helped him through his dark days.
The world knew Barry Humphries as the larger-than-life clown, the puppet-master of monstrous creations Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, and the sharpest of social satirists.
His son, Oscar Humphries, knew him not as Edna, or Les, but as Dad.
Speaking publicly for the first time since his father’s death last month at age 89, Humphries said his father was a companion and guide in their shared passion for art, and a rock of support when, like his dad, he faced down the demons of addiction.
“I realise how lucky I was to have such a powerful relationship with him, and got to spend so much time with him,” said Humphries, 42, a London-based art dealer and curator.
“He died too soon, but he was 89. I had years with him as an adult, and he got to know my kids, which was so beautiful.”
Humphries, whose parents divorced when he was a child, said his father had found a soulmate in his fourth wife, Lizzie Spender, and they had a “very beautiful and successful marriage”.
As an old-fashioned Melbourne-Sydney spat erupted over which city would host a state funeral for Humphries, his son played down the controversy.
While Barry Humphries was born in Melbourne, in 1934, in more recent years he had made his Australian home in Sydney.
The family had chosen Sydney over Melbourne for a state funeral but it was not a “snub” to Humphries’ home town, Oscar said. A date is yet to be announced.
“The two offers of a state memorial were a wonderful honour for my father and received with much gratitude,” he said, dismissing as “simply not true” reports the family might decline both.
“It is such an honour and a touching recognition of his contribution to Australian culture and what he meant to so many people.”
Oscar Humphries said he had a difficult adolescence and had struggled with his mental health and addiction.
Six years ago he had a public falling-out with his father and temporarily changed his surname after he had apparently been disinherited.
“That was me in a bad place, struggling at the time I think with mental health, and lashing out,” he said. “I understand what that was but it’s water under the bridge, many years ago.”
Barry Humphries’ drinking in the 1960s cost him his first and possibly his second marriage, until he finally sought help and gave up alcohol for good.
Oscar said that when he had addiction problems, now in remission, his father was empathetic and supportive because of his own experience with alcohol.
“I think that because Dad had his own history with addiction, he was understanding of some of those same things in other people,” he said.
“It was wonderful to have a parent who was sober and who understood everything that surrounds that – what one needs to do, and the triggers that can lead one back to a darker life.”
He said of his father’s alcoholism: “He was famous from the late 1950s and then he f..ked it all up. Then he came back, and he was given a second life, which is the miracle of sobriety.”
Humphries said he learned from his father about art and collecting, a passion they shared even though their taste for certain artists was sometimes different.
Barry Humphries’ collecting radiated from a fascination with Oscar Wilde and the English-born Australian painter Charles Conder. His library in London amounted to tens of thousands of books.
Humphries said his father never quit the collecting habit, and was ringing book dealers “on the sly” from his bed at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
“What makes him extraordinary, if you step back, is that he had a serious mind and was hugely sophisticated and knowledgeable in so many areas,” Humphries said. “But he was also a popular star. So on one level he could edit a book of esoteric poems, and on another level he had the biggest talk show of the 1980s in England. It’s quite unusual.”
Barry and Lizzie Spender married in 1990 and Oscar said one reason for their successful relationship was that they shared similar interests.
“My father really found a successful, loving, stable relationship when he was quite old, when he married my stepmother,” he said.
“I think part of that may be because she came from this world of poets and artists. Her father Stephen Spender was a major modern poet. Their coming together – obviously it’s a love affair – but also it was connecting with someone who understood fully books and art and that side of his life.”
The family had been touched by the many tributes from around the world after Humphries died.
“And to hear them acknowledge that he was a master, and that he had this influence on them was really beautiful to hear,” Oscar said. “It’s a buffer to grief in a way.”
