TORONTO – From former media baron Conrad Black to late painter Tom Thomson and violinist Mayumi Seiler, Dame Edna has a lot of love for Canada — and some surprising ties to it.
Comedy star Barry Humphries, 81, who brings his lilac-haired, bespectacled alter ego to Toronto on Thursday for a run at the Princess of Wales Theatre, says he’s made several high-profile friends in the city over the five decades he’s performed in it.
“Lord Black is an old friend of mine,” the renowned Australian performer said in a recent telephone interview, noting he plans to see him and his wife Barbara Amiel during his stay in the city.
“I’m dining with them on my night off.”
Humphries said Seiler is among the other friends he hopes to visit with in the city as Dame Edna’s Glorious Goodbye — The Farewell Tour runs through April 19.
As for Thomson, Humphries said he once owned a painting by the famed Ontario-born artist — only he didn’t realize it at the time.
As the ever-humorous Humphries tells it, the saga began some 30 years ago in Australia when he bought a rolled up painting measuring about three metres long from an antiques dealer.
The work depicted pine trees and lakes and mountain peaks and “was signed in red, ‘Tom.'”
“I thought it was by some commercial artist,” said Humphries, who also paints.
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“I forgot about it until I was in a flat in Sydney which had a long, dark hallway. I got a wooden frame and I got my landscape, unrolled it and I stapled it with a staple gun to the wooden frame.
“I folded the canvas over so you wouldn’t read that red word ‘Tom,’ which struck me as being a mark of an amateur.”
Humphries said when he sold the flat, he left the painting in it and didn’t think about it again until a visit to Toronto, when he saw banners outside the Art Gallery of Ontario advertising the work of Thomson.
“I thought, ‘Who is this guy who paints just like my mural?'” he recalled. “I went in and all the pictures had red signatures, had the three-letter word ‘Tom,’ and they were all much smaller than mine.
“Years had passed, but I rushed back to the old flat, I bailed up the present owner and he’d never heard of it or seen it or anything of the kind.
“It just disappeared.”
Of course, Humphries is a master of satire and likes to tell tall tales in the vein of the Dame Edna, so it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction during a conversation with him.
But he insisted it is “a true and tragic story.”
“When I go to your art gallery, I walk quickly past the Thomsons,” he added. “I can’t bring myself to look at them.”
Humphries said Toronto was the first North American city he performed in, back in the winter of 1961, when he was starring in a production of Oliver.
He’s since performed as Dame Edna several times throughout the country.
Humphries next takes his show to Washington, D.C., and insists it is indeed a “farewell tour.”
“I’m not going to deceive my public by pretending to retire, take their money and then come back.”
After all, Dame Edna has had a good run in the last 60 years, packing houses in the West End and on Broadway and winning a Tony Award.
The “housewife superstar” has also had several film roles as well as two talk shows and various specials.
But the touring needs to come to an end, said Humphries.
“It’s not infirmity. It is, frankly, the inconvenience of the travelling and the hotel life,” he said in his dry wit.
“If I reach an age when I have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I could easily get lost. Finding the light switch is the problem, knocking over table lamps and then various minor vexations.”
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