Early Childhood
Humphries was born in the suburb of Kew in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the son of Louisa and Eric Humphries, a construction manager. His grandfather was an immigrant to Australia from Manchester, England. His father was well-to-do and Barry grew up in a "clean, tasteful and modern home" in Camberwell, then one of Melbourne's new 'garden suburbs'. His early home life set the pattern for his eventual stage career—his parents bought him everything he wanted, but his father in particular spent little time with him so he spent hours playing at dressing-up in the back garden.
- "Disguising myself as different characters and I had a whole box of dressing up clothes ... Red Indian, sailor suit, Chinese costume and I was very spoiled in that way ... I also found that entertaining people gave me a great feeling of release, making people laugh was a very good way of befriending them. People couldn't hit you if they were laughing."
His parents nicknamed him "Sunny Sam", and his early childhood was happy and uneventful, but in his teens Humphries began to rebel against the strictures of conventional suburban life by becoming "artistic" – much to the dismay of his parents who, despite their affluence, distrusted "art". A key event took place when he was nine – his mother gave all his books to The Salvation Army, cheerfully explaining: "But you've read them, Barry".
Humphries responded by becoming a voracious reader, a collector of rare books, a painter, a theatre fan and a surrealist. Dressing up in a black cloak, black homburg and mascaraed eyes, he invented his first sustained character, "Dr Aaron Azimuth", agent provocateur, dandy and Dadaist.
Read more about this topic: Barry Humphries
Famous quotes containing the words early childhood, early and/or childhood:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“[In early adolescence] she becomes acutely aware of herself as a being perceived by others, judged by others, though she herself is the harshest judge, quick to list her physical flaws, quick to undervalue and under-rate herself not only in terms of physical appearance but across a wide range of talents, capacities and even social status, whereas boys of the same age will cite their abilities, their talents and their social status pretty accurately.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)