The most significant comedian since Chaplin?

One day, at the age of ten, Barry came home and all his books were gone – his mother gave them away to the Sallies saying 'he read them all'.

The heartbroken and furious Barry spent the rest of his life trying to find and re-buy his precious books and became a prodigious reader and book collector.

Everything to defy mother.

And Edna Everage, come Dame Edna and the disgusting Les Peterson were his ultimate revenge on Mum and on all that was 'so nice', hypocritical, repulsive, and commonplace in Australia and later in the UK and Hollywood.

Comedy gave him the licence to continue playing throughout his life, satirising pretentions ever more fearlessly.

Interviewers tried to nail him down as to what made him tick.

But he made a sport out of keeping his cards close to his chest.

He wanted to stay unfathomably mysterious to the end of his life.

But in one of the last documentaries about his life, he gave himself away more than ever before.

He agreed with the view that what motivated him to have his lifelong stage career was adrenalin.

He said, he was an adrenalin addict; 'a performance junkie'.

When the curtain rose and all the lights shone on him on the stage, while the audience of thousands fell under his spell, they gave him what he could never get from his mother: the deep belly laughter of wholehearted appreciation.