Barry Humphries - Personal Life

Personal Life

Humphries has been married four times. His first marriage, to Brenda Wright, took place when he was twenty one and lasted less than two years. He has two daughters, Tess and Emily, and two sons, Oscar and Rupert, from his second and third marriages, to Rosalind Tong and Diane Millstead respectively. His eldest son Oscar is editor of the art magazine Apollo and a contributing editor at The Spectator. His fourth wife, Lizzie Spender, is the daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender.

In the 1960s, throughout his sojourn in London, Humphries became increasingly dependent on alcohol and by the last years of the decade his friends and family began to fear that his addiction might cost him his career or even his life. His status as 'a dissolute, guilt-ridden, self-pitying boozer' was undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the failure of his first marriage and was a contributing factor to the collapse of the second.

Humphries' alcoholism reached a crisis point during a visit home to Australia in the early 1970s. His parents finally had him admitted to a private hospital to 'dry out' when, after a particularly heavy binge, he was found unconscious in a gutter. Since then he has abstained from alcohol completely and still regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. He was one of the many friends who tried vainly to help Peter Cook, who himself eventually died from alcohol related illnesses.

Humphries was good friends with the English poet John Betjeman until Betjeman’s death in 1984. Their friendship began in 1960 after Betjeman, while visiting Australia, heard some of Humphries’ early recordings and wrote very favourably of them in an Australian newspaper. Their friendship was, in part, based around numerous mutual interests, including Victorian architecture, Cornwall and the music hall.

Humphries appears in the upcoming 2013 documentary Chalky about his longtime friend and colleague Michael White, who produced many of Humphries' first Dame Edna shows in the UK.

Other notable friends of Humphries include the Australian painter Arthur Boyd, the author and former politician Jeffrey Archer, whom Humphries visited during Archer’s stay in prison, and the Irish comedian Spike Milligan.

Humphries has spent much of his life immersed in music, literature and the arts. A self-proclaimed 'bibliomaniac', his house in West Hampstead, London supposedly contains some 25,000 books, many of them first editions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the more arcane and rare items in this collection include the telephone book of Oscar Wilde, Memoirs of a Public Baby by Philip O'Connor, an autographed copy of Humdrum by Harold Acton, the complete works of Wilfred Childe and several volumes of the pre-war surrealist poetry of Herbert Read.

He is a prominent art collector who has, as a result of his three divorces, bought many of his favourite paintings four times. He at one time had the largest private collection of the paintings of Charles Conder in the world and he is a notorious fan of the Flemish symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever, relishing his role as 'President for Life' of the De Boever Society. He himself is a landscape painter and his pictures are in private and public collections both in his homeland and abroad. Humphries has also been the subject of numerous portraits by artist friends, including Clifton Pugh (1958, National Portrait Gallery) and John Brack (in the character of Edna Everage, 1969, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

He is a lover of avant-garde music and a patron of, amongst others, the French composer Jean-Michel Damase and the Melba Foundation in Australia. When Humphries was on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme in 2009, he made the following choices: "Mir ist der Ehre widerfahren" from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier; Gershwin's "Things are Looking Up" sung by Fred Astaire; "Love Song" composed by Josef Suk; "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" sung by Randolph Sutton; "Der Leiermann" from Schubert's Winterreise song cycle; the 2nd movement of Poulenc's Flute Sonata; Mischa Spoliansky's "Auf Wiedersehen"; and "They are not long the weeping and the laughter" from Delius' Songs of Sunset.

In terms of his personal politics, cultural historian Tony Moore, author of "The Barry McKenzie Movies", writes of Humphries as: "A conservative contrarian while many in his generation were moving left, Humphries nevertheless retained a bohemian delight in transgression that makes him a radical".