Michael Leunig, Barry Humphries and John Clarke at Mietta's

Barry Humphries AC CBE (b. 1934), actor, writer and artist, is the world’s all-time most successful solo theatrical performer. After studying law at the University of Melbourne, Humphries joined the Melbourne Theatre Company. In 1955 he created his suburban archetypes Mrs Edna Everage, a Moonee Ponds mother and housewife, her long-suffering husband Norm, and the washed-out, ruminative Sandy Stone. Since the late 1950s Humphries has performed in his own one-man shows in Australia, the UK, Europe and the USA, and Edna Everage’s wild vigour has carried her through such triumphs as Housewife, Super-star; Edna, the Spectacle; and Dame Edna the Royal Tour. In 2000 Humphries won a Special Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Theatre World Award, and an Outer Critics’ Circle Award. He was the subject of the Australian National Portrait Gallery’s first large-scale biographical exhibition in 2002; the following year, he was the voice of Bruce, the shark, in the animated film Finding Nemo and gained an honorary doctorate from the University of Melbourne. His many books include two different autobiographies, More Please (1992) and My Life as Me (2002). In 2012 he announced that the touring show Eat Pray Laugh would be his last.

Michael Leunig (b. 1945), cartoonist, was born in working-class East Melbourne, and studied briefly at university before dropping out to follow the career path of his father, who worked as a slaughterman. At the same time, he began drawing cartoons, and in the mid-1960s his work began to appear in such publications as Woman’s Day and London’s Oz magazine. He later served as resident cartoonist for the afternoon paper Newsday before gaining wider recognition in the 1970s with his work for the Nation Review. In his earliest work Leunig had endeavoured to conduct himself as a classic political cartoonist; but in 1969, frustrated by the genre’s conventions, he submitted a surrealistic cartoon of a man wearing a teapot on his head riding into a sunset on a large duck. It was published, and Leunig would later come to see it as a symbolic depiction of his own escape from the strictures of political cartooning. His subsequent work – in which the duck has frequently reappeared, along with such recurrent characters as Vasco Pyjama and Mr Curly of Curly Flat – has been adapted for television, theatre and radio, and has been collected in many books, beginning with The Penguin Leunig (1974). He is a regular contributor to the Melbourne Age – where his cartoons generally appear three to four times a week – and the Sydney Morning Herald.

John Clarke (1948-2017), satirist and humourist, moved to Australia in the 1970s from New Zealand, where he had begun performing in university revues and was named Entertainer of the Year in 1976. Within a few years he had become well known here in the persona of laconic farmer Fred Dagg. Dagg’s monologues aired six days a week for three years on the ABC. In 1981-1982 Clarke published The Fred Dagg Scripts and Daggshead Revisited, which soon sold over 20 000 copies. In March 1982, the year he was nominated for an AFI award for co-writing the Paul Cox film Lonely Hearts, Clarke and the ABC fell out over suitable topics for satire, but in 1984 Clarke resurfaced on the ABC in The Gillies Report, in which he presented deadpan reports on the fictional sport of farnarkeling. In 1989, 1990 and 1993 he co-wrote three ‘Royal Commissions’ with Ross Campbell. From 1989 to 1997 he appeared regularly with Bryan Dawe on A Current Affair, and in 1998 he returned to ABC screens in a hilarious mocumentary about the Sydney Olympics, The Games. In 2003 he wrote the screenplay adaptation of the Shane Maloney novel Stiff; in 2004, he wrote and appeared in the adaptation of The Brush-Off by the same author. He recently wrote, presented and co-produced the documentary series Sporting Nation. His interviews with Bryan Dawe spanning 25 years have been released on CD, DVD and in book form; he has published many other humorous books.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Helga Leunig 2013
© Helga Leunig