Australian journalist, writer and wit Clive James dies at 80

Clive James, an Australian journalist, joker and intellectual who h a long career as a writer and brocaster in U.K., has died. He was 80.

James’ representatives, United Agents, said he died Sunday at his home in Cambridge, north of London, and a private funeral was held Wednesday.

James been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema, and he suffered kidney failure in 2010.

“I am a man who is approaching his terminus,” James said in 2012. He later assured well-wishers that he intended to live a few more years — and he did, continuing to write and brocast until almost end.

“Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for last time,” United Agents said in a statement. “He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humor, knowing until last moment that he h experienced more than his fair share of this ‘great, good world.’”

poet, essayist, author and entertainer h a gift for tickling divergent sensibilities of reers of highbrow literary magazines and audiences of Saturday night TV in Britain, his opted country.

James was treasured for his comic gift, such as describing Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts.”

In one of his best-remembered book reviews, James pronounced an official Soviet biography of President Leonid Brezhnev as so dull that “if you were to recite even a single page in open air, birds would fall out of sky and dogs drop de.”

James, in his self-deprecating way, once imagined an acquaintance describing him as “ boy from bush who could quote (Ludwig) Wittgenstein,” philosopher.

He was born in 1939 in Sydney suburb of Kogorah. He was an only child whose far survived a Japanese World War II prison camp only to die on flight home, when his son was 6.

Though James said he h no memory of his far, he looked back on his far’s death and his mor’s despair as defining moment of his life.

“I understood nothing except that I could not help,” he wrote in “Unreliable Memoirs,” first of five autobiographical volumes.

“Eventually in my mid-30s I got a grip on myself,” he ded. “But re can be no doubt that I h a tiresomely protracted olescence, wasting a lot of or people’s time, patience and love.”

Christened Vivian after Australian tennis star Vivian McGrath, James won permission from his mor to choose an unequivocally masculine name. He picked Clive from character played by Tyrone Power in 1942 film “This Above All.”

A scholarship for war orphans paved his way to Sydney University, for which he claimed to be unprepared.

But he re hungrily, contributed to school’s literary journal and became its editor.

After a stint at Sydney Morning Herald, he decamped to Britain and Cambridge University. He was alrey bridging worlds of acemia and showbiz, and served as president in 1966-67 of Footlights, university club which spawned stars, including Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Germaine Greer, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Despite acemic success, he fell into depression in his 20s.

“ proof that I was getting rey to jump off a cliff or stick my he in an oven — that I was serious — was that I was giving my books away,” he said in an interview with Financial Times in 2007. “It was largely because I was lost, I h no outlets, and I wasn’t expressing myself. I wasn’t doing what keeps me stable now, which is having a stage and a platform.”

James eventually found multiple platforms, writing poetry, contributing to Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, writing books, reviewing television for Daily Telegraph and hosting “Saturday Night Clive,” “ Clive James Show” and or TV programs.

He also formed a “fleeting friendship” with late Princess Diana, an experience which left him with mixed feelings.

“Even before I met her, I h alrey guessed that she was a handful. After I met her, re was no doubt about it. Clearly on a hair-trigger, she was unstable at best, and when squeeze was on she was a fruitcake on rampage. But even while reaching this conclusion I was alrey smitten,” he wrote in New Yorker magazine in 1997.

James’ best-selling book “Cultural Amnesia” celebrated 100 people whose lives he found inspirational. While book was favorably reviewed, he disavowed any intention to reach cultural elite.

“It is still my mission in life to write in a way so that anyone who can re will understand that I am talking about something,” he said on a U.S. television show. “My enemy is elevated language.”

During his long illness, James increasingly focused on writing poetry, including poem “Japanese Maple,” which was published in New Yorker in 2014 and became a viral sensation.

He recently wrote “Play All,” a book about binge-watching TV shows, and last month released “Somewhere Becoming Rain,” a collection of writings about work of poet Philip Larkin.

A final volume of poems, “ Fire Of Joy,” was finished a month before his death and is due to be published next year.

In 2012, James’ more than four-dece marriage to Prudence Shaw, a specialist in Dante and early Italian literature, was shaken by revelation of his eight-year affair with a younger Australian woman — who compounded his embarrassment by ambushing ailing James for an Australian television program.

James and Shaw h two daughters, Claerwen and Lucinda.

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late Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed to this obituary.