Dame Edna, Australian housewife, megastar, talk-show host, photojournalist, and icon, does more in one day than most of us will do in our lifetimes. While touring with her Tony Award–winning one-woman show, The Royal Tour, she has been working on several other projects, all while taking time to be with her family.

“This isn’t the only thing I do,” she says, speaking on the phone from a hotel room in Florida, the tour’s latest stop. “I write books, I visit hospitals, I photograph war orphans. I’m bringing out a lovely book. A coffee-table book of war orphans.”

She also works tirelessly for the charity she founded, Friends of the Prostate, in honor of her late husband. Edna gets philosophical when asked how she fits all this into her busy schedule. “When people say, ‘Edna, how do you find the time?’ I say to them, ‘How don’t you find the time?’ I make time, because life is a gift, and it doesn’t last forever.”

Dame Edna has been a star since she won Australia’s “Lovely Mother” award in 1956, when her partner in crime, Barry Humphries, discovered her and asked her to be part of a comedy revue he was working on. That was the start of a long, acrimonious relationship, as Dame Edna tells it. “In 1955 or 1956, I appeared on the stage in Melbourne on the campus of the university, a shy, darling little young mother. Humphries saw me, invited me as a consultant. The producers wanted me to do it instead of him, and the rest is history. I did a stint on-stage, the audience loved me, and I went off and did my own shows. But of course, he tied me up in a contract he and I have been disputing together since. Dreadful.”

The tacit conceit of this story is that Dame Edna is Barry Humphries, an Australian character actor. And though Humphries will never have the name recognition he has earned as Dame Edna, his credits are just as impressive. In the late ’50s, he played Estragon in Waiting for Godot, the first Australian production of a Beckett play. He was a fixture in the ’60s in London’s West End, where he appeared in productions of Oliver! and Maggie May and worked with eccentric comedian Spike Milligan on several stage and radio productions. And, of course, he has been playing Dame Edna consistently since the ’70s, when she became the focus of his stage shows.

But when you’re interviewing Dame Edna, you won’t hear too much about Humphries. (She can’t say much anyway right now, since the dispute is still active in the courts, she says.) She’d rather talk about her previous lives, when she was Eleanor Roosevelt, a friend of Henry James, and even Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. To make matters more confusing, she credits Hathaway/Edna with some of the Bard’s best work.

“I can remember sitting at the table with Shakespeare, at the kitchen table, at breakfast time, and he was trying to think up one of his shows,” she says. “I said, ‘What would you like, the scrambled eggs, or would you like the eggs easy over?’ And he was not even listening to me, so I said impatiently, ‘Well, if you want breakfast, tell me now. To be or not to be, breakfast,’ I said to him. It’s funny, I think probably I wrote all the best bits of his shows.”

She’s not entirely certain, but Dame Edna thinks she may also have been Christopher Columbus. But she much prefers her current incarnation. “I can just remember, you know, the food was horrible,” she says, in a flashback. “And arriving . . . frankly, I don’t think I discovered very much of interest at all. But it’s a lovely life that I enjoy. The travel, the new impressions, talking to young, impressionable journalists like you. And above all, sharing my experience, my hope, and my strength with my Bostonian possums.”

And Edna has never been to Boston in her current lifetime, so the prospect excites her. “I’m discovering America again as myself. I’m discovering Boston, certainly, in a week’s time, and I’ve got a spooky feeling I’m going to like what I find.”

It’s all part of Dame Edna’s continuing personal history, which she hopes will “enrich the lives of the sad, boring, and disadvantaged,” as she says on her Web site. That’s the best part of her one-woman shows, and of the character itself. Dame Edna makes it up as she goes along. “I would not insult an audience with a rehearsed show. It’s like a beautiful improvisation. I’m the soloist and the audience is the sort of orchestra. It’s a concerto of audience and megastar.”

That must be hard to coordinate.

“Well, I’m good at it.”

Dame Edna: The Royal Tour plays at the Wilbur Theatre February 20 through March 11. Tickets are $25 to $65, available at the Wilbur box office or through Ticketmaster at 931-2787.