Loyalty and love she lavished free
On lowly friends and well-born,
Like Murdoch, Melba and like me,
She was marvellously Melbourne
The ‘she’ is actress Coral Browne (1913-1991); the ‘me’ is Barry Humphries; the quatrain is from Humphries’ eulogy – or elegy – A Chorale for Coral, which was ‘Very Privately Printed’ in 1992 after her funeral. In his memoirs More Please, which came out the same year, Humphries recalls listening to Browne ‘in the forties’ on the Lux Radio Theatre. In his subsequent autobiographical volume, My life as Me (2002), he recounts how she ‘had come to England to further her theatrical career in the early fifties ... and she was not only a marvellous actress but an infamous wit and the author of many legendary exchanges’.
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