He was a good friend of Joan Rivers.
He was appointed a C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to entertainment in the 2007 Queen Elizabeth Birthday Honours List.
Barry Humphries was one of the hosts of "The Royal Pop Concert" held at Buckingham Palace in London on 4 June 2002. He appeared on stage as Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson and was greatly honoured to introduce Queen Elizabeth II.
On 24 October 2006, Australia Post, together with The Perth Mint, issued a 50-cent legal tender coin featuring a full-colour portrait of Dame Edna. The coin was mounted in a special envelope with 2 postage stamps (featuring both Dame Edna and Barry Humphries as himself) cancelled in Moonee Ponds (the suburb Edna claimed to come from). A 1-dollar, one-ounce Australian silver coin depicting Dame Edna was struck to commemorate Barry Humphries's 50th anniversary as Dame Edna.
He created the role of Mr Sowerberry in the original West End production of Lionel Bart's musical "Oliver!"
In 2000 he received a Special Tony Award for a Live Theatrical Presentation for his one-man show "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour."
He was appointed an AO (Officer of the Order of Australia) for services to theatre in the 1982 Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Image on the film set of five 50-cent Australian postage stamps in the Australian Legends series issued on 20 January 2006. One of the stamps has an unmade-up photograph of Humphries. The other stamps have a photograph of his alter ego "Edna Everage" showing how the character changed over the years.
He admits to being ashamed of the film Les Patterson Saves the World (1987).
He was awarded the Australian National Medal in December 1979.
He was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal in the 2001 Queen's New Year Honours List for services to Australian society through acting and writing.
In 2018 Humphries faced backlash for comments considered transphobic. The comments included references to gender confirmation surgery as "self-mutilation," and to transgender identity as a whole as "fashion-how many different kinds of lavatory can you have?" The comments led to the Barry Award, a comedy festival prize named after the comedian in Melbourne, being renamed the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award the following year.
In February 2023 he tripped on a rug at home and needed hip surgery. After the operation, in which he was fitted with a titanium hip, Humphries joked that he could now be called "Bionic Bazza".
Honorary Doctorate from Griffith University (Australia) in 1994.
He attended media mogul Rupert Murdoch's 2016 wedding to former model Jerry Hall.
A leading art collector, as a result of his three divorces he bought many of his favourite paintings four times over.
His fourth wife, Elizabeth Spender, is the daughter of the poet Sir Stephen Spender.
Humphries once explained that his character Les Patterson "offended Australians, because they found his behaviour a little too accurate".
Humphries first introduced his most iconic character in a 1955 stage show as 'Mrs Norm Everage'. The name was eventually changed to 'Aunt Edna' and later to 'Dame', a title given in the film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie by the then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam.
Humphries has Asperger's Syndrome.
Humphries spent much of his life immersed in music, literature and art. A self-described 'bibliomaniac', his home in West Hampstead, London, was said to hold as many as 25,000 books, most of them first editions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the more mysterious and rare items in the collection include Oscar Wilde's telephone directory, Philip O'Connor's Memoirs of a Public Baby, a signed copy of Harold Acton's Humdrum, the complete works of Wilfred Childe and several volumes of Herbert Read's pre-war surrealist poetry.
He was also a landscape painter, and his paintings are held in private and public collections at home and abroad. Humphries was also the subject of numerous portraits by artist friends, including Clifton Pugh (1958, National Portrait Gallery) and John Brack (as the character Edna Everage, 1969, Art Gallery of New South Wales).
Humphries appears in the 2013 documentary Chalky about his long-time friend and colleague Michael White, who produced many of Humphries's first Dame Edna shows in the United Kingdom.
Another popular Humphries character was Sandy Stone, who wore a dressing gown, lived an ordinary life and "told very dull stories in a very dull voice".
Before his death, he secretly battled a rare form of cancer, Extramammary Paget's Disease (EMPD).
He once owned the largest private collection of Charles Conder paintings in the world.
Writing about Humphries's personal politics, cultural historian Tony Moore, author of The Barry McKenzie Movies, says: "A conservative dissident while most of his generation moved left, Humphries nonetheless retained a bohemian relish for the transgression that made him radical".
He is a great lover of the Flemish symbolist painter Jan Frans De Boever and enjoys the role of 'President for Life' of the De Boever Society.
He is a lover of avant-garde music and a patron of, among others, the French composer Jean-Michel Damase and the Melba Foundation in Australia.
He has a character named Sir Les Patterson.