The death was confirmed by the hospital on April 22, but no other details were immediately provided. Mr. Humphries was hospitalized for complications after hip surgery.

The persona of Dame Edna was so complete that the character was better known than its creator. Edna’s world grew to have its own rich backstory — with a published “autobiography”— that included remembrances of a dead husband, Sir Norman Everage, and an infant daughter taken by a “rogue koala” but who escaped to become a nun. Mr. Humphries came up with it all.

But it was the sparkly, sassy and slightly condescending Dame Edna, not the quietly thoughtful Mr. Humphries, whom crowds came out to see and be welcomed with the signature greeting: “Hello, Possums!”

The character became best known to American audiences through outlandish talk shows beginning in the late 1980s with “The Dame Edna Experience,” where Edna would playfully mock and tease guests such as the actor Charlton Heston, who was called Chuck. Once Dame Edna asked Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to pick up some groceries.

In another show, “Dame Edna’s Hollywood” (1991-1993), she went in the span of two minutes from calling the comic Robin Williams a “kaleidoscopic nightmare” to dancing to the tune of “Act Naturally” played by a big band led by Ringo Starr.

It was like being invited into a seesaw world that swayed between the semi-normal and the absolute surreal, with Edna as a ringmaster, doyenne and prankster in stilettos and shimmery frocks. (Mr. Humphries used feminine pronouns for Edna.) She called herself a “gigastar.” It was a knowing jab at the bizarre nature of celebrity culture — and her ability to cut it down to size — that she made her calling card.

And people grew to love it.

In 1999, Dame Edna opened at Broadway’s Booth Theatre with her show “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” in which she skewered pretty much everyone and everything, on her way to a Tony Award. “The show is so funny that it brought on a friend’s asthma (“She made me wheeze”),” the reviewer Richard Laermer wrote in The Washington Post.

There she was in 2002, at the celebration for Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th year on the throne.

“Here’s the Jubilee Girl, possums,” said Mr. Humphries as Dame Edna, and later led cries of “hip, hip, hooray” wearing a turquoise gown and glasses with two-inch bedazzled tentacles. “And as I said, ‘hip, hip,’” Mr. Humphries, in character as the Dame, said afterward, “I felt the tears coming. Not my tears, of course. The queen’s tears.”

At the 2006 Closing Ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Dame Edna belted out a song over video link while hundreds of “Commonwealth Dames” waved Edna’s signature flower, the gladiola, or “gladdies” as she called them.

Dame Edna so thoroughly took the spotlight that it was an event in itself when Mr. Humphries emerged out of character.

“When does Dame Edna become Dame Edna?” asked an interviewer on Australia’s “60 Minutes” in 2018. “When she puts …”

“The glasses on,” Mr. Humphries cut in.

“Glasses,” said Mr. Humphries. “The glasses make the character.”

Maybe only Elton John has gone bigger and bolder in eyewear. Dame Edna, however, didn’t play with various styles. It was always the cat eye in high-wattage spangle.

The idea was inspired by the silent-film-era actress Stephanie Deste, an Australian who in the 1920s was known for her handmade eyeglass frames with diamanté-studded wings. The glasses became part of the transition of the Dame Edna character in the 1960s from mousy Melbourne housewife to, as Mr. Humphries described, “chanteuse swami-monstre sacre.” (Mr. Humphries never wore glasses in public.)

His spark for the character was tedium, he recounted. In 1955, he joined a traveling theater troupe performing “Twelfth Night.” During the journeys between towns, Mr. Humphries tried to ease the boredom of the road with a country matron bit, based on the civic-minded women who would introduce the visiting troupe’s shows.

The character Mrs. Norm Everage, as in normal and average, took shape. At one point, Mr. Humphries said he considered turning over the character to a castmate, Zoe Caldwell, who would go on to win four Tony Awards. The director urged Mr. Humphries to put on a dress and stick with it.

Mrs. Everage debuted at a show in Melbourne University. The character later morphed into housewife Edna Everage, borrowing the first name of Mr. Humphries’s boyhood nanny.

“Well, I was trying to really describe the Melbourne environment of the time. You know, it was a suffocating thing,” Mr. Humphries said in the “60 Minutes” interview.

Mr. Humphries took the character to London. The understated, somewhat gloomy humor was not grabbing audiences or reviewers. Gradually, Mr. Humphries glammed up Edna’s wardrobe and spiced up her wit, getting more suggestive and taking harder slaps at society. Favorite targets were the rich and pompous and vain. The point: They are just as foolish and insecure as everyone else.

Yet Mr. Humphries was still a bit shy offstage about his outfits. He once went into a London women’s boutique with his standard cover story: I’m buying clothes for my sister in the hospital and, well, we are about the same size. (Mr. Humphries was more than 6 feet tall.)

The clerk replied, “‘Oh, don’t worry dearie, all the boys buy their clothes from us,’” he recounted in an interview with the Age newspaper in Melbourne.

In 1972, Mr. Humphries appeared as “Aunt Edna” in the film “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.” In the 1974 sequel, “Barry McKenzie Holds His Own,” the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, makes a cameo to confer the title of dame on Edna.

So began “Dame Edna Everage” and, with it, the elaborate saga of her life invented by Mr. Humphries and recounted in “My Gorgeous Life” (1989) and “Handling Edna,” a 2009 spoof in which Mr. Humphries describes his life as Edna’s “manager.”

It can get rather blurry at times. In 2016, Mr. Humphries made comments denounced as transphobic when he said he agreed with feminist writer Germaine Greer’s remarks mocking gender-affirming surgery for trans women.

A post on Dame Edna’s social media, apparently controlled by Mr. Humphries, said he was “losing the plot” and “deserves our pity not our disapproval.”

Mr. Humphries later told the Sunday Times Magazine that his words had been “grotesquely interpreted.”

“I don’t think I’m right to pontificate,” he added. “I’m really an actor.”

Yet, Mr. Humphries was always flirting with crossing some line. Hired as an advice columnist at Vanity Fair, Dame Edna was asked by a reader about the need to learn Spanish. “Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to?” Dame Edna replied. “The help? Your leaf blower?”

The actress Salma Hayek wrote a scathing letter to the magazine, which later published a full-page apology and later dropped Dame Edna’s column.

Mr. Humphries said: “If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.”

John Barry Humphries was born Feb. 17, 1934, in Melbourne. His father was a successful developer. His mother was a homemaker.

He described feeling dismayed, even as boy, at the conformity and predictability of life in their leafy enclave. Edna reminded him of that. “I invented Edna because I hated her,” Mr. Humphries was quoted as saying in John Lahr’s 1991 book, “Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization.”

He had other alter egos: the politician Sir Les Patterson, crass and salivating through rotting teeth, and the suburban milquetoast Sandy Stone.

In 1960, Mr. Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, in the original West End production of the musical “Oliver!” and took the same role when the show came to Broadway in 1963. He staged a one-man show, “A Nice Night’s Entertainment,” in London in 1962.

But heavy drinking began to overwhelm him. He voluntarily checked himself into clinics, but he always drifted back into bars. He described how he hit bottom: back in Melbourne and passed out in a gutter in 1970. He became sober and said he never touched another drink.

Mr. Humphries found projects outside Dame Edna, including as the voice of Bruce the shark in “Finding Nemo” (2003). Edna was always in the wings.

She returned to Broadway in 2004 with “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance” and in 2010 with the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein in the revue “All About Me.”

Mr. Humphries also wrote about himself — rather than in the guise of Dame Edna — in memoirs “More Please” (1992) and “My Life as Me” (2002).

In a twist worthy of his shape-shifting career, Mr. Humphries playing Dame Edna playing a lawyer character, Claire Otoms, appeared on the Fox show “Ally McBeal.” The credit went to Dame Edna.

“I think most people think I’m a rather peculiar person,” Mr. Humphries told the Irish newspaper the Independent in 2008, “and I suppose I am in some ways. But really what I am is just an imaginative actor.”

Mr. Humphries was married four times. Three marriages ended in divorce: to Brenda Wright, then Rosalind Tong and later Diane Millstead. He married Elizabeth Spender in 1990.

Survivors include his wife, two daughters from his second marriage, two sons from his third marriage and 10 grandchildren. Mr. Humphries lived in London and returned to Australia late last year.

Australia has a Dame Edna statue and a stamp and a road. There was one last honor. In 2020, an iridescent Australian soldier fly was named Opaluma ednae. Turned out Dame Edna’s hair had a “striking resemblance” to the hues of the fly.