Leo McKern Dies, Aged 82
wooster
Press Association
Tuesday 23rd July 2002, 13:08 BST
Actor Leo McKern, most famous for his role in TV series Rumpole Of The
Bailey, has died aged 82.
Australian-born McKern had been ill for some time and died at a
nursing home near his home in Bath, his agent said.
McKern suffered from diabetes and other health problems and was
transferred to the nursing home a few weeks ago.
He was married to actress Jane Holland and had two daughters, Abigail
and Harriet. He had one grandchild.
Born Reginald McKern in Sydney in 1920, he planned to become an
engineer until he lost his left eye in an accident aged 15. He turned
to acting and met his future wife when they worked in the same stage
company, following her to England in 1946 and marrying her two weeks
later.
He enjoyed spells at the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company and
won critical acclaim for his role as Thomas Cromwell in the film
version of A Man For All Seasons in 1966. A string of film roles
followed, including an appearance in Ryan's Daughter.
In 1975 he played Rumpole for the first time in a TV play based on the
John Mortimer novels. His portrayal of the crumpled defence barrister
was a hit with viewers and his reference to wife Hilda as "she who
must be obeyed" became part of the nation's vocabulary.
The ITV series continued for a decade and a half and McKern was happy
to play the same character for so long. "With Rumpole one comes to be
reconciled to the fact that it isn't half a bad thing to be stuck
with," he once said.
McKern last appeared in the West End two years ago in the play
Hobson's Choice. His last film role was as a bishop in period drama
The Story of Father Damien, released in 1999.
James L. Neibaur
henchmen plot to get one of Ringo's rings. He was a lot of fun in that role,
and I sought out his work thereafter.
RIP
JN
Please visit the most poorly designed web pages online:
my Favorite Movies web page:
http://hometown.aol.com/jimneibr/myhomepage/movies.html
and my Favorite Performers web page:
http://hometown.aol.com/jimneibr/myhomepage/rant.html
To...@fred.net
: RUMPOLE STAR LEO MCKERN DIES, AGED 82
Goodbye, the New and Improved Number Two!
And condolences to She Who Must Be Obeyed.
--
To...@Fred.Net http://www.fred.net/tomr
* "Hello, girls.... I'm the Easter Bunny!" - Janet Reno, "South Park"
* Look out! If Bender says "ass", Katherine Harris will appear!
"... and Rosanjin Scholar, Simon Cowell!" - "Iron Chef", Alternate Timeline
"If someone is jailed for quoting Tom Lehrer, then our true American
liberties are gone." - MattH
Mary Kay Bergman 1961-1999 - http://www.mkbmemorial.com/
"It's been a lot of fun." - Alison Brooks
MadCow57
wooster
July 23, 2002
Actress Patricia Hodge, who made numerous appearances in "Rumpole of
the Bailey" said on Tuesday: "The example he set was not just as an
actor but as a man. In both he was a great listener and sublimely
humorous."
The UK Bar Council also paid tribute to the actor. "He brought a touch
of humanity, colour and life to the way the legal profession is seen
on television," a spokesman said.
wooster
23 July 2002
Rumpole creator Sir John Mortimer himself led the tributes to McKern,
saying: "He was a wonderful actor. He not only played the character
Rumpole, he added to it, brightened it and brought it fully to life.
"He was a very private man who never failed in his public
performances."
Louis Epstein
: Evening Standard (London)
: 23 July 2002
: Rumpole creator Sir John Mortimer Sir John himself led the tributes to
: McKern, saying: "He was a wonderful actor. He not only played the
: character Rumpole, he added to it, brightened it and brought it fully
: to life.
: "He was a very private man who never failed in his public
: performances."
Any reason why these quotes were repeated,"Wooster"?
He also appeared with Liane Langland,in Murder With Mirrors
(he the detective,she an innocent but interesting suspect,
Helen Hayes as Miss Marple the diviner of guilt while McKern
did his job).
I first encountered his work in The Prisoner,where he was Number Two
near the beginning,and again in the final two-parter,last seen
heading for Parliament under the closing titles.
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
R.
> I first saw him as the menace in the Beatle movie HELP!,
> where he and his henchmen plot to get one of Ringo's rings.
> He was a lot of fun in that role, and I sought out his work
> thereafter.
I'm sure "Help" (1965) is where most of us growing-up-in-the-1960s first
remember seeing him. He was damn funny in that role! "Go to the window!"
RIP Leo McKern, 1920-2002
> RIP
> JN
> Please visit the most poorly designed web pages online:
> my Favorite Movies web page:
> http://hometown.aol.com/jimneibr/myhomepage/movies.html
> and my Favorite Performers web page:
> http://hometown.aol.com/jimneibr/myhomepage/rant.html
--
x-no-archive: yes
"I think there are only three things that America will be
known for 2,000 years from now when they study this
civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball.
They're the three most beautifully designed things this
culture has ever produced."
--Gerald Early, Scholar
http://baseballasamerica.org/
wooster
Daily Telegraph (London)
24/07/2002
Leo McKern, the actor who died yesterday aged 82, won his reputation
in classical roles; to the public at large, however, he was known
chiefly for his portrayal of the lead in the television series Rumpole
of the Bailey, written by John Mortimer.
Horace Rumpole differed from the generality of barristers in his lack
of ambition and his concern for his clients. He loved to flout
authority, and to use his legal skills in defence of the
underprivileged. Outside court he enjoyed smoking cigars, quoting
poetry, drinking claret ("Chateau Fleet Street") in Pomeroy's Wine Bar
and muttering imprecations against his domineering wife.
McKern always denied that his own character resembled Rumpole's. "I'm
not as loyal as Rumpers," he observed. "I would have left She Who Must
Be Obeyed ages ago."
Nevertheless, for millions of viewers, in America no less than
Britain, McKern's rotund figure, gravel voice, furrowed brows, and
irascible manner excluded all possibility of any rival interpretation
of Rumpole.
Rumpole of the Bailey was first shown from 1978 to 1980, with further
series in 1983, 1987-88 and 1991-92. Although concerned about becoming
typecast, McKern admitted that he found it difficult to abandon such a
success.
"I get together with John [Mortimer], he asks me if I feel like doing
another. I usually say yes."
For 30 years before Rumpole, McKern had been a distinguished classical
actor, appearing with the Old Vic Company, as well as at Stratford and
in the West End. His Iago, a role which he played twice, on a tour of
Australia in 1953-54 and again at the Old Vic in 1962-63, was
particularly admired.
Of the latter interpretation, Kenneth Tynan observed that it "kept the
evening on course - squat and squalid as a poisonous bug, yet equipped
with a mask of profound concern that would deceive a saint".
As the Common Man in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Season (Globe, 1960),
McKern gave a superb performance as a bellicose, time-serving oaf. The
next year he presented a brutish Thomas Cromwell in the same play.
In his own estimation the greatest event of his theatrical life was
playing Peer Gynt at the Old Vic in 1962-63. Not all the critics
agreed. Why, demanded Charles Marowitz in Plays and Players, did "this
daemonic and unbeatable clown take on heavy roles?"
It was true that McKern never enjoyed himself more, and never gave
more pleasure than as Toad of Toad Hall at the Prince's Theatre in
1954.
Leo Reginald McKern was born at Sydney on March 16 1920 into a family
which had migrated from Limerick in 1864. "Father," he recalled, "was
a clever bugger, very astute and a whiz at logarithms and geometry and
algebra. Whereas mother, the poor old sausage, was bloody thick."
Leo was educated at Sydney Technical High School which he left at 15.
"For at least a year," he later complained, "my spirit as well as my
studies had been cruelly savaged by the bullying of two sadistic
monsters called Parsons and Samson. It is a pleasant thought to
consider they may have been killed in the war."
He himself served as a corporal in the Royal Engineering Corps in
Victoria during the Second World War, and hated it. Indeed, from the
moment of leaving school his career had progressed badly. He had begun
work as an engineer in the factory which employed his father and two
elder brothers, only to lose his left eye in an accident.
Later at least one theatre critic felt that the loss lent his
countenance an arresting ambivalence. Certainly McKern never made any
fuss. He would absent-mindedly tap his false eye with a ball-point, or
put it in his spaghetti and then call the waitress to complain.
The missing eye brought him £1,000 in compensation with which he took
himself off to a commercial art college, afterwards working in a sweet
factory designing wrappers. His limited sight, however, did not
prevent him joining the Engineers. To the miseries of the military
life he added those of an unhappy marriage, which ended in divorce
within 18 months.
So bored had he been in the Army that he had joined an acting group,
and when illness eventually secured his demobilisation he found a
living in the professional theatre. Almost immediately he fell in love
with an actress called Jane Holland; and, when she left to pursue her
career in England, he scraped together enough money to follow her.
They were married at Bromley Register Office in 1946.
McKern's first job in England was as a meat porter at Sainsbury's.
During the hard winter of 1946-47 the McKerns were so hard up that
they had to sell their gas heater in order to buy food. Fortunately
McKern's mother had forced him to pack three pairs of long johns.
In 1947, having rid himself of his Australian accent, McKern acted
with the Combined Services Entertainment Unit on a tour of Germany,
and soon afterwards played Simon in Tyrone Guthrie's production of
Molière's L'Avare (The Miser).
This led in 1949 to an invitation from the Old Vic Company, where he
made his name in a succession of small character parts. In 1953-54
McKern went with the Stratford Memorial Company on a tour of
Australia, playing not merely Iago, but also Touchstone in As You Like
It, and Glendower and Northumberland in Henry IV Part I.
At Stratford in 1954 he undertook Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida,
Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew and Friar Lawrence in Romeo and
Juliet.
In 1955 he began a fruitful occasional association with Frank Hauser
at the Oxford Playhouse; later he would play Volpone (in 1967) and
Shylock (in 1973) under Hauser's direction.
McKern took on parts in a number of films, including Murder in the
Cathedral (1951), The Mouse That Roared (1959), King and Country
(1964), The Beatles' Help! (1965) and - as Thomas Cromwell - A Man For
All Seasons (1966).
He was so disgusted, though, by what he considered a wasted year
making Ryan's Daughter (1970) that he decided to cure his depression
by selling his house, his Rolls-Royce and his collection of porcelain,
in order to drive his family to Australia in a Volkswagen Camper Van.
He had, in fact, always been terrified of flying, and preferred any
alternative mode of transport. Motor cars were a particular love, and
in the course of his life he owned some 50 of them, from Riley
Kestrels to Porsches.
McKern went to live in Queensland, in a house which he described as
being "surrounded by snakes, toads and spiders that made my hair stand
on end". He was soon back in England, where he had a success as the
suspicious husband in Molnar's comedy The Wolf.
The réclame he won as Rumpole never eclipsed his stage career, and in
1978 his Uncle Vanya at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, struck Bernard
Levin as "an unqualified triumph . . . real, rich, rewarding". In 1980
he enjoyed another hit with the French play Rollo, which perfectly
suited his capacity for gusts of Churchillian wrath.
His later credits included a Rabelesian one-man entertainment, Boswell
for the Defence (The Playhouse, 1989-90, and subsequently in Australia
and Hong Kong); Hobson in Frank Hauser's production of Hobson's Choice
at Chichester (1995); the photographer Henry Ormonroyd in J B
Priestley's When We Are Married (1996), and, Squire Hardcastle in She
Stoops To Conquer at the Sydney Opera House (1999).
Leo McKern is survived by his wife and two daughters. The elder,
Abigail, is an actress, who played Rumpole's pupil Liz Probert.
Legacy of 'grumpy Rumpole'
By Hugh Davies
Daily Telegraph (london)
24/07/2002
Leo McKern, endearingly curmudgeonly as Horace Rumpole, died yesterday
at a nursing home near bath. He was 82.
McKern brought Rumpole of the Bailey to exuberant life, brightened it
and added to it, the character's creator, Sir John Mortimer said
yesterday.
The QC and playwright, who modelled Rumpole on himself and his blind
father, said that the actor was "a very private man who never failed
in his public performances".
With a distinctively bulbous nose, fine jowls and ample girth, McKern
was perfect for the part, relishing in his frequent oratorical
outbursts from the Oxford Book of English Verse and vivid recall of
the Penge Bungalow Murders Case.
He was charmed by Rumpole's long-vanquished aspirations for love and
understanding - and with lines such as "judgitus, like piles, is an
occupational hazard on the bench" he obviously realised there was no
better part.
But McKern was often unhappy, decrying his television fame as an
"insatiable monster". He stressed that his Peer Gynt was a greater
performance and lamented: "If I get an obit in any paper, they will
say, '. . . of course, known to millions as Rumpole'."
In life, the Australian-born actor was sometimes as grumpy and
eccentric as Rumpole. Reporters who bumped into him aboard a cruise
liner, docked in Florida, looking for a woman known as "Miss Whiplash"
were astonished when instead of a wisecrack he launched into a tirade
about disturbing his peace.
With a dread of flying, he was taking the sea route home at the time,
but appeared as crusty as he did in delighting millions of Thames TV
viewers with the onset of Rumpole of the Bailey in 1977, a series that
ran until 1992.
The show was equally popular in America, where it ran under the PBS
Mystery banner - and a website devoted to him noted last night that he
had moved to "TV Heaven".
Patricia Hodge, who played Phyllida Erskine-Brown, the stylish and
savvy barrister married to Claude and favoured by Rumpole, said
yesterday: "He took his work seriously, but never himself."
She recalled "a great listener" and a "sublimely humorous" man.
"Working with Leo was one of the greatest learning experiences I have
ever had. We shall all miss him."
Peter Bowles, who acted the hapless judge Guthrie Featherstone helped
out of jams by Rumpole, said: "Leo was one of those rare actors who
had no pomposity. He wasn't a luvvie. He always kept the child within
him."
The profession was also taken with him. A Bar Council official said
that he introduced "a touch of humanity, colour and life" to the
picture of the legal profession.
Geoffrey Robertson, QC, said that McKern's great achievement was "to
create a lawyer the world could love". He said: "He embodied the
independence of the Bar, infuriating governments, judges, policemen
and all persons in authority. Rumpole was television's first and
perhaps only truly Dickensian character."
McKern came from Sydney at 26 to act at The Old Vic and in the Royal
Shakespeare Company, despite having a glass eye and an Australian
accent. He spent nearly a year in Ireland filming one of his best
characterisations, the mole for the Brits in Ryan's Daughter, and was
the blustering cult leader in the Beatles' Help movie. The critics
also lavished praise on his performance as Thomas Cromwell in the film
A Man For All Seasons.
But in later years he could never escape from Rumpole. Sir John
Mortimer, in crafting each episode, had continually to deal with the
actor's complaints of becoming typecast, and McKern complied with
in-character truculence. The author said that McKern "could make you
laugh and cry".
He could turn in an instant from comedy to pathos "or play both of
them at the same time". His acting was "about two feet from the
ground, a little larger than life but always taking off from reality".
wooster
Actor best known as the down-at-heel barrister in 'Rumpole of the
Bailey'
By Adam Benedick
24 July 2002
The Independent (London)
Before he erupted as Horace Rumpole, the ageing, grumpy, hen-pecked
and endearingly down-at-heel barrister in the television series
Rumpole of the Bailey, Leo McKern had seemed destined for greatness.
Not that his portrait of the disillusioned lawyer, misunderstood by
his wife ("She Who Must Be Obeyed"), was not greatly admired as a
beacon of wit, even wisdom, in the monotonous, meritricious landscape
of nightly small-screen fiction.
But McKern had known what great acting was. And if he himself never
rose to its rare heights, he had worked with some of those who had,
and he knew that, for those with a taste for it, great acting was
worth a thousand nights with Rumpole.
He also knew that it was hard to acquire that taste in the modern
circumstances of the theatre and especially of television; and that
whatever marvels a player might seem to achieve in front of the
camera, they had nothing to do with what went on at the Old Vic and
Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1950s and 1960s when McKern first began to
operate.
He had the luck to find himself standing in the darkened wings at the
Old Vic only five years after he had landed at Southampton in 1946 out
of the Australian blue, to seek his fortune, both maritally and
theatrically. He almost immediately married the actress Jane Holland;
but his theatrical ambition needed more patience in the frozen winter
of 1946-47. The couple had to sell their gas fire for food. He went to
work at Sainsbury's as a meat porter.
But Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic spotted him as likely comic material
for Miles Malleson's new translation of The Miser (1950); and
thereafter McKern made rapid headway in the classics to bring him up
against the legendary Donald Wolfit in Tamburlaine the Great at the
Old Vic. As McKern stood in the wings counting down the lines to his
entry, suddenly he sensed in his ear what could only be described as a
"leperous distilment". It came from Wolfit in an off-stage whisper as
he waited to follow McKern on stage. Amid assorted cluck-cluckings,
tut-tuttings and general disapprobation, Wolfit hissed: ''It's yer
make-up. Dreadful! Much too much!"
McKern went on to become not only one of the soundest and
widest-ranging actors in Britain, especially in the classics, but,
within the next five years, a regular West End lead in all sorts of
British, European and American drama. What made his success unusual
was his looks. Bun-faced, short-built, faintly arrogant,
resonant-voiced and with a nose which curled upwards like W.C.
Fields's, McKern was not only less than handsome, but also wonderfully
one-eyed. He could adjust his glass eye to any direction on the facial
compass, so as to give his countenance a peculiar and sometimes
teasing ambiguity, looking as if it were in two directions at once.
This was often apt to make audiences sit up; as was McKern's stage
presence. It possessed authority; and the fatter he became with the
years, the greater grew McKern's gift for holding our attention. Until
Rumpole, he was never type-cast. Even Rumpole, he used to say, went
against his type. Though he might have shared the man's irascible
outbursts at the ways of the world and particularly of politicians,
and also his taste for claret, he could never match Rumpole's
steadiness of purpose, professional integrity and philosophical
patience.
In fact, McKern could be almost anyone he chose – from Harold Pinter's
intimidating tyrant behind an office desk in Tea Party (on television,
1965) to the comicially jealous husband of Judi Dench in an old
Hungarian frolic called The Wolf (1973) in the West End, or the
amiable Irish innkeeper in the 1970 film Ryan's Daughter.
His most famous stage role was probably the Common Man in Robert
Bolt's A Man for All Seasons in 1960. It was a gift-wrapped part which
McKern unfolded with relish; but when the play moved to Broadway in
1961 he was re-cast as Thomas Cromwell because an already-established
clown (George Rose) had been promised the part. McKern, disappointed,
played the horrid Cromwell and was hissed. Why? He could never fathom
it.
Another puzzle for him was Kenneth Tynan's attitude to his casting as
Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Aldwych, 1958). Before it opened
Tynan had said in print that it was odd for the "extremely talented"
McKern, in his thirties, to be playing "an exuberant sixtyish titan of
ox-like stature". And in the event he described McKern's "enormous
vocal exertions" as beside the point, because Big Daddy's cynical
animal zest "should flow without effort". The more McKern tried, the
more, for Tynan, he failed. Yet Tynan had been one of his staunchest
advocates from the beginning at the Old Vic.
McKern spent five successive seasons learning to be a classical actor
– three at the Vic and two with the Shakespeare Memorial Company under
Anthony Quayle. One of his biggest hits with the Stratford company
came in the West End as Toad of Toad Hall (Princes, 1954). As a keen
private collector of old cars, McKern was impeccably cast.
Like his old mentor Guthrie, McKern valued the provinces not only as a
training ground but also as a ground for classical experiment. Hence
Guthrie's invitation to McKern to join the new Nottingham Playhouse
Company as Menenius in Coriolanus (1964); and he also enjoyed the
challenge of the arena of Manchester's Royal Exchange as Uncle Vanya
(1978) and in a revival of his old success Rollo (1980).
But by then Rumpole had begun to rule McKern's life. Rumpole of the
Bailey, written by John Mortimer, first appeared in 1975 as a Play for
Today for the BBC and continued on Thames TV for seven series until
1992. McKern made two efforts to wriggle free of Rumpole, to no avail.
Considering that at school he had always detested Shakespeare and
never went on the stage until his mid-twenties, he served the theatre
well. The loss of an eye in a works accident in adolescence, when he
was trying to follow his father as an electrical engineer, tempted him
to play practical jokes later – tapping it, for example, with a
ballpoint pen to disconcert his fellow players or half-submerging it
in his spaghetti bolognese before complaining to the waitress.
His excuse for such vulgarities? He used to quote James Agate's belief
that an actor's abilities were broadened by "a touch of the gutter".
Agate was a critic with strong views on great acting. A pity that he
never lived to see McKern. Certainly few actors of McKern's generation
had a better training in the classics or put it to better use; and
fewer still could claim, as he did, not to be ashamed of anything he
had ever done, on stage, screen or television.
# Reginald McKern (Leo McKern), actor: born Sydney, New South Wales 16
March 1920; AO 1983; married 1946 Jane Holland (two daughters); died
Bath 23 July 2002.
Brian Watson
"wooster" <mrberti...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:5d56a972.02072...@posting.google.com...
And using John Mortimer's words showed up its foolishness and snobbery.
--
Brian
"I will not be pushed"
Tony Dickson
"wooster" <mrberti...@yahoo.com> wrote
> underprivileged. Outside court he enjoyed smoking cigars, quoting
> poetry, drinking claret ("Chateau Fleet Street")
Chataeu Thames Embankment
wooster
By Graeme Webber
AAP News
07/25/2002
SYDNEY, July 24 AAP - Leo McKern's wishes to work full-time in
Australia and die in his homeland were never fulfilled, a film
director said today.
The tragic postscript to McKern's outstanding acting career was made
by George Whaley who directed the veteran actor in the film Dad and
Dave On Our Selection, co-starring Geoffrey Rush as Dave and Dame Joan
Sutherland as mother in 1994.
Mr Whaley said McKern's acting versatility ranged from a British
barrister in the renowned BBC drama Rumpole of the Bailey to a true
blue ocker in the larrikin tales of Dad and Dave.
McKern was a hilarious character both on and off the screen without a
hint of pretension, Mr Whaley said.
"One of the tragedies of Leo's life was that, quite frankly, there
wasn't enough work to keep him here," Mr Whaley said.
"Leo left Australia at a very early age because the opportunities were
much greater overseas.
"He maintained an extraordinary love of this country and he would come
back very regularly, every year."
McKern appeared in numerous movies but Mr Whaley said his presence was
often shaded by the glamorous leading stars.
"He was not obviously a matinee idol," he said.
Mr Whaley last spoke to McKern six months ago, when he reluctantly
turned down a role as an aging biologist in a feature film because of
ill-health.
McKern confided to Whaley that he wanted to die in Australia as he
turned down what might have been his last film.
"His last wish was to die in Australia, he told me that when we last
spoke," Mr Whaley said.
"He was a great man, it's been a very depressing day for me."
wooster
By Melissa Jenkins
AAP News
07/25/2002
SYDNEY, July 24 AAP - The late Leo McKern could knock back a beer and
tell a dirty joke but he also had a sensitive side which made
audiences adore him, the director of Australia's leading acting
academy said today.
McKern, best known for his role as the eccentric lawyer Rumpole on the
BBC series Rumpole on the Bailey, died aged 82 yesterday at his home
in Bath, England, following a struggle with diabetes.
Paying tribute to the Sydney-born stage and screen star, the Director
of National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA), John Clark, said McKern
was a contradiction - as all great actors are.
"He had a manner that was gruff, fruity and down to earth and he liked
to tell the odd naughty joke ... he was a good drinker and a good
liver," Mr Clark told AAP.
"Yet underneath was a very sensitive and caring person ... who had a
great deal of intelligence as an actor and knew exactly what he was
doing."
Born Reginald McKern in Sydney in 1920, he was conscripted to the army
as a clerk at age 20.
He soon became bored, turned to acting and moved to England.
McKern was accepted at London's Old Vic in 1949 and then began work
with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He returned to Australia for two years in the 70s but returned to
England and took the role of Rumpole which was screened as a
television play in the mid-decade.
"We all watched Rumpole of the Bailey and feel we all know him
(McKern) because his personality is so rich," Mr Clark said.
"The relationship he sets up with his audience is so intimate and
friendly that you get to love him and feel you know him."
McKern last appeared as a bishop in the period drama The Story of
Father Damien in 1999.
He was married to actress Jane Holland and had two daughters and one
grandchild.
Hurricane7
Patricia
"wooster" <mrberti...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:5d56a972.0207...@posting.google.com...
> A heart-warming tribute from John Mortimer himself .
>
>
> IRASICBLE AND ECCENTRIC, THE ONE-EYED GENIUS WHO REALLY WAS RUMPOLE;
> FROM THE CREATOR OF TV'S FAVOURITE BARRISTER, A WARM TRIBUTE TO LEO
> McKERN
>
> By John Mortimer
> Daily Mail (London)
> 07/24/2002
>
> WHEN I wrote the first Rumpole for BBC2's Play For Today, I had no
> idea who would play the eccentric, irascible, small cigar- smoking,
> indifferent claret-swigging enemy of pompous judges and champion of
> justice.
>
> And then, in some blessed moment, the director mentioned Leo McKern.
>
> There started an extraordinary period of a writer's life, a time when
> a character he has written is not only portrayed perfectly by an
> actor, but enriched, extended, filled out and brought entirely and
> vividly to life.
>
> Leo, who died yesterday aged 82, was born in Australia, and there is
> something precious in the Australian character, a healthy lack of
> respect for authority.
>
> Perhaps he didn't seem, at first, to have all the qualifications of
> one of the finest actors who ever illuminated our stages and screens.
> Shortish, becoming fat, he had lost one eye in an industrial accident
> and was deaf in one ear.
>
> But before Rumpole became an idea in a writer's mind he had
> established himself as a superb actor, in a season with the great
> director Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic and in many plays.
>
> He had starred in The Beatles film Help! and made enough money to buy
> himself a boat, which was his private passion. He had fallen in love
> with the beautiful and thin young actress who he had admired as she
> flew in and out of stage windows in Peter Pan. She had agreed to marry
> him and the devoted Jane was with him when he died.
>
> So we did the first Rumpole play sometime in the mid-Seventies. Few of
> the Rumpole characters had been invented, but Rumpole's wife Hilda,
> 'She Who Must Be Obeyed' - who was to be played by a succession of
> daunting actresses - was there to give him as hard a time at home as
> he'd had in court.
>
> By good fortune, I found an actor who was always the first to arrive
> in the rehearsal room, where he had finished the Times crossword
> almost before the first paper cup of instant coffee.
>
> HE COULD make jokes, recite quite rude limericks, and was as dextrous,
> and light on his toes, as a dancer. He could roll a hat up his sleeve
> until it fell magically on his head. He had a voice which could sound
> gruff but, most touchingly, could also be as sweet as honey.
>
> He was a most serious actor who could be a great comedian. He was,
> quite simply, when we did that first play, the only Rumpole.
>
> When we'd finished, he rang me and said he had so enjoyed the
> character that could we, perhaps, do a series? The BBC was slow on the
> uptake, and we moved to Thames Television.
>
> It was there that the inhabitants of Rumpole's chambers entered the
> scene, Phillida Trant, Guthrie Featherstone, Claude Erskine- Brown,
> played by such hugely accomplished actors as Patricia Hodge, Peter
> Bowles and Julian Curry.
>
> But all the actors were inspired by Leo's performances. He was the
> perfect leader of a company, full of invention and always a joy to
> work with.
>
> We heard rumours of Rumpole being broadcast in the U.S. and, thanks to
> Leo's performances, it was a success.
>
> The Rumpole Society of San Francisco met to argue over his cases, and
> stage Hilda Rumpole lookalike contests.
>
> After every series, Leo would say we shouldn't do any more, but in the
> end we did something like nine series, in which his acting was always
> impeccable.
>
> The legal profession became more and more indebted to someone who
> could actually make a lawyer seem a decent, sensible, fearless fighter
> for truth and justice. This was, indeed, just what Leo McKern was.
>
> He remained a private sort of person, not a great giver of interviews
> or a searcher for publicity. His life with Jane and his daughters
> Harriet and Annabel, an extremely accomplished actress who played Miz
> Probert in Rumpole, was kept out of the spotlight.
>
> In politics he was a crusty conservative and I'm a pinko liberal but,
> so far as I can remember, we never quarrelled about anything.
>
> He was generous always in calling me the 'only begetter' of Rumpole,
> but the character was born as a partnership in which the actor had
> just as much a part to play as the writer.
>
> We went on holiday to Florida, where Rumpole, for a brief period, had
> decided to retire, until he remembered that Florida was a satisfactory
> place to live only if you happen to be an orange.
>
> I remember Leo taking out his glass eye and climbing up to the highest
> diving board, whence he entered the water as lightly as a rather large
> swallow.
>
> I saw him take out the same glass eye in a restaurant and place it in
> the middle of a plate of spaghetti bolognese, where it glared up and
> confronted the waiter. I remember another location on a cruise ship to
> Venice when, in a moment of eccentric friendliness, he waltzed me
> round the dancefloor, an event of which, happily, no photographic
> record exists.
>
> He could be intolerant of unprofessional conduct and timewasting in
> the movies. He was in David Lean's film Ryan's Daughter and said he
> was kept waiting for days until the director found a seagull flying in
> the right direction or some such photographic opportunity.
>
> This came before we started the Rumpoles when, angered at what he
> thought was pointless timewasting, Leo decided to give up the entire
> acting profession and retire to a rainforest in Australia.
>
> He was always passionately concerned with the ecology of the planet.
> Even his rainforest couldn't silence the call of his remarkable
> talent, and he was back again, to the delight of us all.
>
> His loyalties were divided between Britain, which he loved, and his
> native Australia. At times he decided he wanted to end his days in
> Australia and he would set off.
>
> The journey took him a long time. Leo hated flying, and he sometimes
> travelled by a commercial shipping line with his beloved Porsche in
> the hold.
>
> Arriving in Australia, however, he promptly decided Britain was the
> place in which he wanted to end his days.
>
> SO HE came back and made his final home in Bath, that great monument
> to the Age of Enlightenment, the town of such wonderfully eccentric
> Englishman as Dr Johnson and Boswell, with whom Leo felt a special
> affinity.
>
> In fact, one of his greatest performances was in a one-man show about
> Boswell, Dr Johnson's biographer, a lawyer who was vain, vulnerable,
> and great-hearted.
>
> Boswell devoted his talents to saving a young woman who had tried to
> escape the gallows in a penal colony in Australia.
>
> Leo was, of course, a superb Boswell, as he was the perfect Uncle
> Vanya in Chekhov's play and Gloucester in Laurence Olivier's TV film
> of King Lear.
>
> It was one of the great tragedies of the theatre that he never played
> Lear, because the irascible, wilful old monarch who achieves wisdom,
> gentleness and finally peace, when near to madness, would have been a
> natural part for Leo, and it could have broken the hearts of many
> audiences.
>
> But we must be grateful for what Leo gave us. He was a superb actor in
> the tradition of Englishmen such as Charles Laughton and Americans
> such as Edward G. Robinson.
>
> Everyone could admire him, and it was not for nothing that he played
> the 'Common Man' in Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons.
>
> He could appeal to every free spirit in an office who creates trouble
> for the pompous head of the company, to everyone who wants to sweep
> away prejudice and injustice and give the underdog a fair hearing, and
> to everyone who wants to lighten the mysteries of the Establishment
> with a strong ray of common sense.
>
> He will be missed by everyone who watched his performances, whoever
> acted with him - and by any writer who had Leo McKern to bring one of
> his characters so wonderfully to life.
wooster
By Robert Taylor
The West Australian
25 July 2002
BACK in the late 1980s, your humble editor made his living producing
features for the newspaper, known in the trade as "colour".
And possibly the most colourful person he ever met was a 69-year-old
thespian named Leo McKern, who at that stage was enjoying enormous
success on the small screen portraying the irreverent and irascible
lawyer, Horace Rumpole.
McKern was travelling to Perth to do a turn in the one-man play
Boswell for the Defence, and basically cash in on the popularity of
Rumpole.
He was a man of strong views, Mr McKern, one of which was that by rail
or sea were the only legitimate ways to travel, which is why we drove
to Rawlinna, 390km east of Kalgoorlie, to meet up with him.
Horace Rumpole was coming to Perth on the Indian Pacific, in fact, as
the train pulled into Rawlinna we were astonished to see Horace in the
driver's seat.
"Don't say I was driving the thing, you'll get everyone into trouble,
you can say I was in the cabin, but not driving," is an approximation
of his first words on being introduced.
Later, as we got down to the serious business of the interview in his
deluxe suite, Leo McKern didn't hold back. On Melbourne, the city of
his youth: " ... Ruined by overcrowding and high-rise buildings. You
could wrap it up in a wad of toilet paper and drop the whole thing in
Port Phillip Bay."
On Sydney: "Sydney grew higgledy-piggledy and was ruined from the
start."
On the Japanese: "I am convinced, I may be paranoiac about it, but I'm
convinced that it is a national ambition of the Japanese to control
the economy, first of the southern hemisphere and secondly of the
world.
"We remember the Japanese in the camps pushing Australian soldiers
under and drowning them in their own SHIT." (This said with some
force.)
On Australia's cultural cringe: "You get these bloody idiot fringe
nuts that seem to think you can create a native culture. Culture is
culture, it's like a culture in a bloody petrie dish, it grows of
itself."
And on democracy: " ... Everyone has not only a vote, but a voice. So
that sort of system of government invariably ends with a lot of people
talking at the top of their voices at the same time and accomplishing
absolutely nothing."
Depending on your own point of view, McKern, who died this week at the
age of 82, was 100 per cent right, 100 per cent wrong or on some
sliding scale in between.
You be the judge.
Terrymelin
McKern's death is being treated in Australia as if he were Diana, Princess of
Wales!
Terry Ellsworth
Robert R. Feigel
wrote:
>A heart-warming tribute from John Mortimer himself …
>
>
>IRASICBLE AND ECCENTRIC, THE ONE-EYED GENIUS WHO REALLY WAS RUMPOLE;
>FROM THE CREATOR OF TV'S FAVOURITE BARRISTER, A WARM TRIBUTE TO LEO
>McKERN
>
>By John Mortimer
>Daily Mail (London)
>07/24/2002
>
>WHEN I wrote the first Rumpole for BBC2's Play For Today, I had no
>idea who would play the eccentric, irascible, small cigar- smoking,
>indifferent claret-swigging enemy of pompous judges and champion of
>justice.
>
>And then, in some blessed moment, the director mentioned Leo McKern.
>
>There started an extraordinary period of a writer's life, a time when
>a character he has written is not only portrayed perfectly by an
>actor, but enriched, extended, filled out and brought entirely and
>vividly to life.
>
>Leo, who died yesterday aged 82, was born in Australia, and there is
>something precious in the Australian character, a healthy lack of
>respect for authority.
>
<reluctantly snipped>
>
>He will be missed by everyone who watched his performances, whoever
>acted with him - and by any writer who had Leo McKern to bring one of
>his characters so wonderfully to life.
What a fine tribute by one of my favourite writers about one of my
favourite actors. The glass eye the plate of 'spagbol' - priceless.
It's a tribute I shall keep, as I will my memories of Leo McKern's
performances. Thank you for posting it, B. Wooster, esq.
********
The art & the artists of New Zealand's Tutukaka Coast: <http://www.earthsea.co.nz>
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.earthsea.co.nz/surfwriterintro1.htm>
MadCow57
McKern's death is being treated in Australia as if he were Diana, Princess of
So, do you have a problem with that?
Tinman7828
Or an employee of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Robert R. Feigel
Au contraire. Australians treated the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales as that of a much loved English lady and the mother of a future
king. They're treating the death of Leo McKern as that of a much loved
Australian who brought credit to himself, his profession and his
country of birth. As well they should. b
wooster
The Times (London)
07/25/2002
Andrew Hoellering writes:
I believe that the first film role taken by Leo McKern (obituary, July
24) was in my father's production of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the
Cathedral (1951), in which he gave a powerful performance as the Third
Knight. The film was made in a disused church in St John's Wood, which
George Hoellering had converted into a film studio.
While McKern may have had his reservations about the international
film industry ("a bloody great merry-go-round"), he certainly enjoyed
filming on a small scale. According to my father, he was wholly
absorbed in his role, and a delight to work with.
wooster
this Australian newspaper interview . . .
VALE LEO McKERN, MUCH MORE THAN JUST OLD RUMPOLE
DIRECTOR PAUL COX MOURNS LEO McKERN, AN ACTOR WITHOUT EGO BUT WITH
WARMTH, WIT AND GENEROSITY
By John Larkin
The Age (Melbourne)
27 July 2002
Last weekend, and without any notice, Paul Cox suddenly had the
certain sense that Leo McKern was dying. By Tuesday the great actor
was indeed gone, aged 82. McKern was in England and Cox in Melbourne.
But the Australian film director's premonition showed the strong link
established between them when they worked on their first and last
picture together. It was their first meeting.
Made three years ago, Molokai: The Story of Father Damien was also
McKern's last film. The director's cut is currently being shown in
Australia, the film's first release here.
Set in Hawaii, it is the late-19th-century story of Damien, the heroic
Belgian priest - played by Australian actor David Wenham - who worked
with the lepers on the island of Molokai at great sacrifice. The local
bishop, McKern's role, was one of the few people who tolerated and
later supported Damien in his many battles with the church to secure a
better life for the lepers.
Going on location for Molokai would have been an ordeal for McKern,
who hated flying. But, as Cox says of his playing Bishop Maigret: "He
had been given the part and loved it very much because he was some
sort of rebel."
Himself a film veteran, having made 18 features, Cox spoke with wonder
of McKern, Derek Jacobi and himself being locked up for four days
together to shoot several scenes in a mock-up bishop's room on
Molokai.
"It was supposed to be set in Honolulu, but we made it up on the spot
from an old ping-pong room. In terms of my relationships with actors,
they would have been the most delightful days of working with those
two great ones. There was never a moment of irritation by them. There
was no pretence. They just gave.
"Leo was deaf, and of course couldn't wear his hearing aid while
filming. Yet he would read the other actors' lips with the most
perfect timing.
"He was always human, and always kindly. Like many great people, he
was without ego. I learnt a lot from him about being generous.
"Working with him and Jacobi, I'd feel such subtlety in their
performances. You'd be amazed. It was like working with very fine
instruments. It was quite extraordinary. These were very simple scenes
on the surface, but when you put them through the film, the way they
adjusted to their parts was just baffling, and beautiful to watch."
Previously, Cox knew mostly of McKern's work from his famous Rumpole
series, in which his character flouted authority and sought justice
for the underdog. He was moved by his performance in Travelling North
with co-star Julia Blake in 1987. "He had such great screen presence.
Although some people had warned me that he could be difficult, we
never had a bad word between us."
McKern's commitment to Molokai was no exception to the usual pattern
of working with Cox being a highly charged experience, with cast, crew
and director becoming deeply involved. The intimacy was heightened by
the wildness of the location, sharing the technical difficulties, and
the trouble Cox had with the Belgian producers, a protracted and
painful legal struggle.
McKern, for whom producers were often a source of much chagrin, was
one of the many prominent members of the international cast who
supported the director.
Cox recalls how McKern counselled him: "Ignore the bastards", with his
rich gravel voice growling out from the depths of his being.
"I went to see him to discuss the producers' amazing brutalisation of
our film. He didn't go to their premiere, in protest. He was very
angry, and very supportive," Cox says.
He sounded off with great heat about producers in an interview in 1991
while touring Australia in Boswell for the Defence, saying: "All
producers hate actors in their hearts. Why? Because actors bloody well
stand up and do it and they (producers, et al) don't!"
Cox says: "I think he enjoyed the drama with the producers, and loved
fighting the good fight."
Cox was impressed by the mighty McKern voice, greatly suited as it was
to both classical and contemporary parts. "It was so powerful. You
couldn't help taking whatever he said seriously. His presence is quite
significant and solid as one of the great pillars of the picture. He's
one of the characters you have to believe. He had truth."
McKern also had a brilliant sense of humour. "At one stage, he had to
be put on a big boat in Honolulu. He was a bit heavy, and had to be
carried up on a forklift. All the while, he kept blessing everybody.
Another day, I had an accident on the set. I was lying spreadeagled on
the lawn, with a big hole in my head. When I came to, the bishop was
standing beside me, giving me his blessing. He was always making
jokes. At lunchtime on the set, he'd take off his bishop's robes and
sit there in his shorts and white legs, and say, `Don't look at my
milk bottles!'
"One day we were in a restaurant in the Hilton in Honolulu, drinking
chianti. Someone came up to us with one of the hotel's serviettes,
asking for Leo's autograph. Leo looked at the napkin, then up at him
and said, `Hilton, Honolulu. What an interesting name'. He then wrote,
`To Hilton, from Leo McKern'."
Cox says that for someone so public, McKern was a private man. "But he
loved to pretend to be chatting up the girls. The costume designer,
Bernadette Corstens, loved him very much and went out of her way to
look after him. Playfully, he'd say to her, `My God, darling, if only
I was two years younger'."
In a final tribute, Cox reflects: "I feel very blessed by having
worked with him. He was a humble giant. They don't make that kind any
more."
wooster
The Gold Coast Bulletin (Queensland)
July 27, 2002, Saturday
THE late Australian actor Leo McKern's only Gold Coast appearance was
in 1991 when he starred in the acclaimed one-man British play Boswell
for the Defence at the Gold Coast Arts Centre.
Bulletin theatre scribe Doug Kennedy recalls receiving a phone call
from a nervous publicist looking for journalists prepared to talk to
the ageing actor on line to London. "He's got health problems such as
diabetes, a glass eye and, of course, he doesn't suffer fools gladly,
so we're being very careful about who gets to talk to him," said the
promoter.
"We think he might be able to handle you for about 10 minutes, but
don't worry."
While our Doug reports that it felt like being asked to ride the
feistiest horse in the local rodeo, the conversation got off to a good
start as McKern was happily ensconced in his favourite London club,
having just had a good dinner.
As well, the two shared a mutual fear of flying.
"Just do what I do old fellow," said McKern, Rumpole style. "Pretend
you're on the tube going to the other end of the line."
McKern's Coast visit was a big hit, with the actor saying the Arts
Centre's theatre was more friendly and intimate than Brisbane's
Concert Hall, which had been put into 'Lyric theatre mode' for the
show.
wooster
The Cairns Post (Queensland)
July 26, 2002, Friday
WHILE television and film fans mourned the death this week of Leo
McKern, Far North Queenslanders remembered with fondness the
Australian-born actor who made Cairns his home in the early 1970s.
After recharging his batteries in the laid-back Far North, McKern went
on to find fame in the part he made his own, the pugnacious barrister
Horace Rumpole in the long-running TV series Rumpole of the Bailey.
An exhausted McKern "retired" to Cairns and a hillside house in
Stratford after a demanding role in David Lean's 1970 film Ryan's
Daughter.
Well-known Cairns amateur theatre identity Kevin Shorey recalled
meeting McKern when Mr Shorey was manager of Crofton Clauson jewellers
and was asked to repair the McKern family collection of clocks. Later
in 1970, Mr Shorey was weekend news presenter at Channel 10 when
McKern used the studios to record a voice-over for a documentary on
legendary cinematographer Frank Hurley.
McKern's aversion to flying forced the voice-over to be recorded in
the Far North rather than the production offices of the documentary
company in Sydney.
"Incredibly, he had stage fright and this agonising fear of doing
recordings," Shorey said yesterday.
"The notes were shaking so much in his hands they affected the
recording and he had to put them down. It was a surprise to us all."
But, although plagued by stage fright throughout his career, McKern's
recording, like all his work, was perfect.
"There was not an inkling of it in his marvellous voice."
Mr Shorey is vice-president of the Cairns Little Theatre and president
of the Cairns Cultural Co-ordinating Association but never raised the
subject of amateur theatre with McKern.
"You knew the theatre was something he didn't want to discuss," Mr
Shorey said.
"He and his wife were very reclusive."
Mr Shorey recalls McKern's wife Jane often yearning for England when
the couple found the weather in Cairns testing, particularly during
the summer months.
McKern quietly would remind his wife of the usual temperature in
London during December and January.
But the lure of London's stage and film work took McKern back to
England after four or five years.
He was later to return to Cairns and Port Douglas when starring in the
award-winning 1987 film treatment of David Williamson's Travelling
North.
Actor Diane Cilento, of the Karnak Playhouse north of Mossman,
remembers McKern in seemingly contradictory terms as being "a lovely
creature" as well as a "hellraiser" during their early days on the
London stage.
It was during the run of the Eugene O'Neill play Anna Christie, where
McKern played Ms Cilento's father, that she met her first husband Sean
Connery who played the role of her lover.
Ms Cilento first met McKern in a London pub in the late 1950s. She was
unaware McKern had lost an eye in a teenage accident.
It was not long before Ms Cilento experienced his mischievous wit
firsthand.
When he left the table for a few minutes, McKern casually popped out
his glass eye and laid it next to his drink, saying to the startled
Cilento, "I'll just keep an eye on my beer."
Ms Cilento became close friends with the actor and his family. "Leo
became a fixture of one's life in London," Ms Cilento said yesterday.
His home became a popular spot for many London-based actors.
"He lived in a nice house on the river and there was nice food," Ms
Cilento said.
The Australian actress also spent some time with McKern during the
filming of Travelling North.
"He was staying in the old schoolhouse in Port Douglas and really
loved it up here and was vaguely thinking of settling here," she said.
Ms Cilento saw McKern in his last stage play in London. "He was in
great form but not well," she said. "He had been suffering for a long
time."
Ms Cilento considered that McKern's early "hellraising days in London
when we were all in the theatre", and his long-term diabetes did not
improve the actor's later health.
wooster
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
July 31, 2002
Rumpole of the Bailey is dead. Except, of course, he is not. He will
live forever. He and Leo McKern, the great British-Australian actor
who brought him to life, are truly timeless.
McKern was conventionally described in the obituaries as Australian.
But although he was born in Sydney, he lived for 56 years -- virtually
all of his adult life -- in England. And in Rumpole he brought to life
one of the greatest and most loved English eccentrics in modern
popular culture. McKern died last week at the age of 82 but truth to
tell, in the last 40 years of his life, he never seemed to age at all.
And before that, he never seemed to be young. Like the magnificent
Walter Matthau, it was as if his destiny was to be grumpily
middle-aged all his life. Never having been young, was it surprising
that he never seemed to grow old?
As long ago as 1966, he was already grumpy and sinisterly middle-aged,
as Thomas Cromwell, mastermind of England's 16th-century Protestant
reformation and persecutor of Sir Thomas More, in Fred Zimmermann's
magnificent Oscar-winning adaptation of Robert Bolt's play, "A Man for
All Seasons."
Paul Scofield got an Oscar for playing More but McKern was every bit
his equal as Cromwell, truly an English Grand Inquisitor, confronting
him in the movie's climactic court scenes. His Cromwell was a Dark
Rumpole, the lovable, tubby, intelligent teddy bear, as the ruthless,
brilliant secret police chief.
Short, dumpy and, well, not conventionally handsome -- to put it
mildly -- he nevertheless had an instinct for homing in on apparently
unattractive and unsympathetic roles, filling them with vibrant
humanity and converting them into cultural icons. He did the same
thing only a year later in the extraordinary 1967 British surrealistic
TV series "The Prisoner," starring and produced by Patrick McGoohan.
McGoohan played No. 6, the eponymous "Prisoner" of the title
imprisoned on an apparently idyllic island resort that was really a
high-tech, creepy, no-holds-barred international jail.
No one knew who No. 1 was. The series finale copped out on any
coherent explanation. But in every episode a leading British actor of
the day would play a different No. 2, sent to run The Village and
break The Prisoner.
McKern played the first No. 2. He played him so well he was brought
back for the climactic episodes. He made the role again his own so
much that two decades later, an adult American comic book updating the
saga for a new generation of fans, brought back his version of No. 2
as the final, ultimate villain for No. 6 to grapple with.
These roles, like most of the ones McKern played in his movie and
stage character actor heyday, were villainous ones. But what he will
be most loved and remembered for will be the one that went against his
stereotyped grain: Horace Rumpole, John Mortimer's crusty British
barrister, or courtroom lawyer, with a heart of gold, and a glittering
intellect to match it.
Rumpole was brilliant and principled, petty, short-tempered,
ridiculous and vain. He loved gossip. At a time when American network
TV detectives and lawyers, were still almost entirely tall, lean,
handsome and with characters photocopied off the soul of Gary Cooper,
he hit American TV in the late 1970s with the shock of the Beatles or
Monty Python. Once again, those quirky, unconventional, spin-bowling
Brits had upended the notions of propriety in popular culture that
Hollywood and the TV networks had spent so many laborious decades in
dutifully copying from them in the first place.
Rumpole was more than quirky -- he was also actively subversive. Like
his creator Mortimer, he appeared to be the quintessentially
conservative English gentleman, right down to his grumbling, rumbling
relationship with his tall and handsome but truly terrifying wife,
Hilda, "She Who Must Be Obeyed."
He flirted often but inevitably ineffectually with the stunning young
lovelies who worked in his law offices or who sought his aid. All this
was familiar. But his social views were tolerant and, in the great
traditional of English fiction, harking all the way back to Charles
Dickens, he loved to expose the absurdities of the very legal system
within which he flourished. His attitude toward that legal system was
one of love and hate as intertwined as any helix of DNA.
His attitude toward wife and life was the same. No wonder we loved
him.
It takes a collaboration of many hands to create a great television
series or movie, but ultimately the crucial achievement is one of
teamwork and tension between the writer and the actor who plays the
key part, between creator and interpreter. Rumpole was blessed in
having exceptional talents producing both.
Read any of Mortimer's "Rumpole" tales, and McKern leaps to life from
the pages for you. Any good character actor could have made a lot out
of Rumpole. But once you have seen McKern play him, you know that no
one else will do.
Like the wonderful John Thaw, who died earlier this year after playing
"Inspector Morse" in more than 30 made-for-TV serials, McKern produced
the one and only, definitive interpretation of an already famous
fictional character. And just as Thaw's interpretation of Morse
forever altered and guided the way novelist Colin Dexter later wrote
the character, so did McKern's interpretation determine the way
Mortimer forever afterward wrote Rumpole.
McKern played Rumpole even longer than Thaw played Morse. He played
him in 44 episodes made between 1975 and 1992.
There is a small, select Valhalla of exceptional characters in popular
fiction that outlive their creators and seem to take on an independent
life of their own. Sherlock Holmes, of course, stands as the prime
example. Thanks to McKern's flesh and blood portrayal, even more than
Mortimer's fine writing, Rumpole has done so, too. One can anticipate
a PBS revival of his classic series in the near future. If they do
not, Arts and Entertainment network assuredly will.
Somewhere in the Vast Beyond, the great science-fiction writer Pohl
Anderson -- also sadly recently taken from us -- hypothesized that
there is a world where everything we imagine as fiction is real. It is
a world where William Shakespeare is acclaimed not as the greatest of
dramatists but of historians, because every one of his works that we
regard as plays is there just a factual record of what actually
happened. In such a world, perhaps McKern and his doppelganger Rumpole
might even meet. In these days after McKern's passing, it is
especially nice to think so.
Jim Barker
wooster wrote:
>
> Somewhere in the Vast Beyond, the great science-fiction writer Pohl
> Anderson -- also sadly recently taken from us -- hypothesized that
> there is a world where everything we imagine as fiction is real. It is
> a world where William Shakespeare is acclaimed not as the greatest of
> dramatists but of historians, because every one of his works that we
> regard as plays is there just a factual record of what actually
> happened. In such a world, perhaps McKern and his doppelganger Rumpole
> might even meet. In these days after McKern's passing, it is
> especially nice to think so.
Just to be ARW - that's "Poul Anderson". "Pohl" would be Frederick Pohl,
another great SF writer who's (AFAIK) still happily with us.
Jim
(reformed SF fan)
MadCow57
real identity. "It's him all right. He just doesn't want to let on."<< -- Allen
Saddler
I have a cousin who's a dead ringer for Michael Douglas. You can't sit in a
bar and and have a quiet beer with the poor guy.
wooster
By Malcolm Brown.
The Independent (London)
8 August 2002
SOME AMONG the many admirers of Leo McKern might recall his rare but
memorable incursions into the field of factual television, writes
Malcolm Brown [further to the obituary by Adam Benedick, 24 July].
In 1967 he narrated for BBC1 a documentary to mark the 50th
anniversary of the Russian Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down,
doing so with much resonance and vigour. The narrator of Granada's
parallel programme, Ten Days that Shook the World, was the great Orson
Welles, but there were many who thought that if there was a palm to be
awarded it would have gone to Leo McKern.
As a producer of that BBC programme I vowed that one day I would find
a subject for him in which he would appear not just as a voice but as
a presence. This I was able to achieve in 1976 when I persuaded the
BBC that he should be the on-screen storyteller in a documentary to
mark the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. He accepted the
brief, if with a certain modest trepidation, but it was clear as soon
as filming on the battlefield began that he would turn in a
performance of extraordinary power. From that moment the programme had
a charmed life, being shown to wide acclaim in Britain and nominated
not only for a Bafta but for an International Emmy.
wooster
By Lester Middlehurst
The Express
09/16/2002
ONE of Abigail McKern's most treasured possessions is a selfportrait
by her late father Leo McKern, who will be for ever remembered by
millions of television viewers as Rumpole of the Bailey. It hangs on
the wall of the summer house in the garden of her London flat where
she herself paints - a talent that she has inherited from her father.
"He gave it to me a few years ago, " she says. "He was working away
from home and late one night he sat in front of the mirror in his
hotel room and drew it. It is a simple pen and ink portrait and has
faded over the years but it is still the most favourite thing of his
that I have."
It is less than two months since the talented actor died of old age in
a Bath nursing home.
Yet his 46-year-old actress daughter is remarkably composed as she
talks about him.
This is partly due to the overwhelming response she has had from
people all over the world, who have written to her saying how much
they loved and respected her father. "I was absolutely gobsmacked by
the letters I received from people I haven't seen for years and people
I didn't even know, all writing lovely things about my father. That
was hugely moving and very comforting.
"Rather than mourning his death I have tended to think about all the
positive aspects of his life. He had a fantastic life and career and
when you think of the thousands of people who admired and liked him it
tends to make you happy rather than sad."
Leo was 82 when he died after six weeks in a nursing home near the
house that he and his wife Jane had lived in for the past 15 years.
"He basically died of old age, " says Abigail. "It was just a gradual
shutting down of the system."
Father and daughter were incredibly close - Abigail also has a younger
adopted sister, Harriet - but they were also very similar, which
caused them to have an often fractious relationship. The name Abigail
actually means "father's joy" but there were times, she admits, when
she was anything but.
"We had a complex relationship. We were close but we used to drive
each other absolutely mad. There were times when we had quite an
antagonistic relationship and we would say all sorts of dreadful
things to each other. Then I would have to write and apologise for
things I'd said but it didn't stop us loving each other."
AMONG the character traits that Abigail has inherited from her father
are a fiery temper and lack of self-confidence. The latter,
particularly, caused her problems early in her career as she felt she
was living in her father's shadow and constantly sought his approval.
"That had changed over the last few years. I now know that I am my own
person. Often when I'm working people will come up to me months
afterwards and say, 'I didn't know you were Leo McKern's daughter' and
I quite like that. Not because I'm at all ashamed to be his daughter
but because I'm not an appendage. I'm a human being in my own right."
When she was starring in Rumpole Of The Bailey as junior barrister Liz
Probert, Abigail still had feelings of inadequacy working alongside
her father. But, three years before he died, the two of them played
father and daughter in She Stoops To Conquer at the Sydney Opera House
in Leo's native Australia, by which time her self-confidence had
grown.
"It is one of the happiest times we had together. I was so glad that I
had the chance to work with him on stage before he died. When he did
die I felt quite at peace that there wasn't anything unresolved
between us."
Last week Abigail opened in Terry Johnson's black comedy Dead Funny at
the Chichester Festival Theatre. The play runs until October 5, after
which she would like to go on holiday with her mother.
"While I've been working, my partner Jonathan has been incredibly
supportive of my mother but I would like us to go away together, just
the two of us. My parents were together for 60 years, and when you've
been together that long there must be the most extraordinary hole when
one person dies. I wouldn't have any conception of how that must feel.
"But my mother is the most energetic, positive woman I know. She's
much better than me at seeing the positive. I'm more like my father in
that respect. She was a complete rock to my father and hugely grateful
for what they had together. They were an incredibly good team."
Abigail admits that her parents were a hard act to follow. Her own
marriage, to actor Andy Readman, ended in divorce in 1992 after seven
years and she was on her own for six years before meeting her present
partner, design consultant Jonathan Silver.
"I was absolutely on my own for six years - not even any casual
boyfriends - and I think it did me a lot of good. It's made me feel
that if I was on my own again I know that I would have the inner
strength to survive.
"I've been through that whole thing of selfhatred but I have come out
the other side a much better person. I don't think I would have been
ready for a relationship before but I was by the time I met Jonathan."
The couple met while attending a course in personal development called
The ISA Experience six years ago. Abigail's lack of selfworth and
confidence had reached such a low point she felt she needed
professional help.
SHE admits: "I'd spent my life thinking that I wasn't as confident as
the next person but when you are sitting in a room of 200 people,
including a nun, a movie director, a bank manager and a single parent,
it makes you realise that we all suffer from some kind of insecurity.
"I hadn't gone there in a romantic frame of mind so nothing happened
between us during the course. After it finished a few of us would meet
up because we had become close, almost like an extended family.
Jonathan was one of the group and we've been together for about five
years now. Jonathan is very patient, caring and quiet and so different
from my father and men that I've been attracted to in the past, I have
learned a lot from him.
"Dad liked Jonathan very much. He was the one that Dad had the most
respect for because he could see that he was doing me so much good.
And I think he was probably quite pleased that Jonathan wasn't an
actor."
Having been through crises in her own life Abigail feels well equipped
to play Eleanor in Dead Funny. Eleanor is a woman married to a man who
is more interested in the Dead Comics Society than his wife. She
covers up her frustration and unhappiness with her acid wit but is
obviously a sad, bitter woman.
"I certainly recognise bits of myself in Eleanor, " says Abigail. "I
wouldn't say that I am a bitter person but I have bitterness in me.
She is clearly a woman in need of therapy as we all are from time to
time."
Eleanor is also desperate to have a child - an emotion Abigail has a
profound empathy.
Since meeting Jonathan she has tried in vain to become pregnant. "I
have gone down the IVF route and failed but it's always worth a try, "
she says. "I'm like a lot of women who are leaving it later and later
to have children because of our careers.
"I didn't really want children when I was married because I was so
engrossed in my career. It seemed like there was tons of time ahead.
When I got divorced I didn't want to have children on my own but I
thought I would still have plenty of time left.
"Then I was on my own for six years and didn't meet anyone until
Jonathan with whom I would have loved to have a child with. We've
tried but it just hasn't happened and now I'm coming to terms with the
fact that it probably won't happen. But I don't want us to become
obsessed with it. It puts enormous strain on a relationship and I
think we've just got so exhausted with the whole thing.
"There is that pressure on a woman to think she has failed because she
isn't a mother but I think I've got a healthy take on it now.
I'm trying to think positively about all the plus sides of not having
children, such as having more freedom and more disposable income.
"I'm not saying that takes the place of having a child. I would rather
have one and I'm very sad I don't. But I refuse to spend the rest of
my life being miserable because of it. I've got so many years ahead of
me and I love my friends, my partner and my career. My glass is
definitely half full rather than half empty."