Emily Perry

Feb 22 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

SHE WAS created at the age of 80 by a brilliant man, who dressed as a woman to produce a character possessed of both lacerating wit and billowing absurdity.

But when asked about her late arrival on stage and screen, she would sit in a retirement home for entertainers, ear trumpet primed, claiming that she could not remember a thing about her life.

Twenty years earlier, how- ever, Barry Humphries had spotted Emily Perry looking “thoughtful” at an audition.

Miss Perry didn’t know what the part was, but Humphries saw in her mournful, glum countenance, crumpled by the disappointments of life, the ideal Madge – the silent stooge to his alter-ego as Dame Edna Everage, the rasping Australian superstar housewife, with a gaudy line in spectacles, gowns and beads, intimately acquainted to the world’s famous people.

There had been two previous Madge Allsops, Madeleine Orr and Connie Hobbs, but Miss Perry defined the part, though she never spoke, appearing on the Dame Edna Experience, Dame Edna’s Neighbourhood Watch and Dame Edna’s Hollywood between 1987 and 1995. Her official task was to slap an identity tag on the celebrities, who usually sust- ained, with remarkable rest- raint, hilarious mockery from the hostess. Madge then sat sulking on the side of the stage.

She was Dame Edna’s long-suffering companion, who had even been her bridesmaid, catching the bouquet, “on the back of the neck, unfortunately”.

Some saw in Miss Perry’s deadpan performance a hint of Margaret Dumont’s role in the Marx Brothers’ films. There was also a suggestion of the relationship of Joan Fontaine’s crushed companion to Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

But to Dame Edna, poor Madge was “a human maggot held together by bacteria and I mean that in a caring sort of way”.

Patricia Emily Perry was brought up in Torquay, the daughter of an accountant. She began performing on the stage as a girl and attended the Gracie Cone School of Dancing in London. She danced, acted and sang in the music hall and featured in successful touring shows.

During the war, she was with the forces’ entertainment wing, Ensa.

She then ran her own dancing school, before retiring to look after her mother, returning to the theatre after her death. Miss Perry was fond of animals, including her pet parrot, Charlie Brown.

Emily Perry, actress; born June 28, 1907, died February 20, 2008.