Screenwriter & Rumpole of the Bailey Writer, John Mortimer

[duster]

What a wide-ranging career. Mortimer sure earned his rest


BC-OBIT-Mortimer, 2nd Writethru BgtHL:British writer John Mortimer dead at 85; created Rumpole of the Bailey
LONDON -- British lawyer and writer John Mortimer, creator of the curmudgeonly criminal lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey, died Friday. He was 85.
Mortimer's family said he died early in the morning at his home in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London, with his wife and children at his side. They did not disclose the cause of death.
Mortimer combined a career as a lawyer with a large literary output that included dozens of screen and stage plays and radio dramas. His most famous creation was Horace Rumpole, a cigar-smoking, wine-loving barrister who appeared in a TV series and a string of novels and stories.
"It's hard to think he's gone," said Tony Lacey, Mortimer's editor at publisher Viking. "At least we're lucky enough to have Rumpole to remind us just how remarkable he was."
Born April 21, 1923, and educated at Oxford University, Mortimer qualified as a lawyer in the 1940s and worked as a barrister in the British courts.
A lifelong supporter of Britain's Labour Party and self-proclaimed "champagne socialist," Mortimer took up several high profile freedom of speech cases. He defended Penguin, the publisher of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," against obscenity charges in the 1960s, and later represented the radical magazine Oz at an obscenity trial and defended Gay News magazine against a blasphemy charge.
His legal career took in everything from divorce cases to murders -- and he said he preferred the latter.
"Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways," he once said. "Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable."
Mortimer combined legal and literary careers for years, writing early in the morning before heading off to court. He published his first novel in 1947 and produced a stream of plays and radio dramas from the 1950s.
His work included understated and poignant dramas such as "A Voyage Round My Father," a play inspired by his relationship with his own lawyer father that was filmed with Alan Bates and Laurence Olivier.
He wrote screenplays for film and television, including the 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," one of the decade's biggest TV hits.
His novels included the "Titmuss" trilogy about the rise of an ambitious Thatcherite politician named Leslie Titmuss.
But his most popular creation by far was Rumpole, the barrister and bon vivant who would take on any case, and usually triumphed. Played on television by Leo McKern, Rumpole had a passion for the underdog, a love of poetry and a wife he referred to as "she who must be obeyed."
In a series of stories and shows beginning in the 1970s, Rumpole applied his motto "never plead guilty" to cases that touched on issues from fox hunting to alternative lifestyles, child abuse to devil worship.
Despite his left-wing principles, Mortimer's views were idiosyncratic. He supported fox hunting and the monarchy, was skeptical of feminism and once said he believed in every aspect of religion except God.
A noted raconteur and wit, he was famous for his trademark owlish glasses and his one-liners.
"No brilliance is required in law," he once said. "Just common sense and relatively clean fingernails."
Mortimer was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998.
Mortimer had a son and a daughter from his marriage to writer Penelope Mortimer, which ended in divorce in 1972. She died in 1999.
He later married Penelope Gollop, and had two daughters, including actress Emily Mortimer.
In 2004 Mortimer disclosed he had recently learned he had a fifth child -- a son, Ross, from a 1960s affair with actress Wendy Craig. Craig and her husband raised the boy and did not tell Mortimer he was the father for more than 40 years.
Mortimer's wife and children survive him.
Funeral details were not immediately available.
10:02ET 16-01-09

[Long Gone Day]

I..had..no..idea..he..was..the..writer..behind..Rumpole..and..so..many
other..wonderful..works.....What..an..amazing..man!....We..still..get..
Rumpole..here..on..PBS...from..time..to...time.....I..will..also..keep
my..eye..out..for..the..film..*A.Voyage.Round.My.Father*.....

[orionova]

Two wives named Penelope? What are the odds on that!

RIP, Sir John. I've loved your books for years.

[Linnie]

Here's a story about how John Mortimer met his son by Wendy Craig. (She was and is still very pretty, and we used to love her in "Butterflies".) Quite a stormy life Mr. Mortimer led for a while there!

attribution:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle2631639.ece

October 11, 2007
How John, at the age of 82, met for the first time his 42-year-old son by the actress Wendy Craig

It had always endeared me to John that, as an excitable youth of 24, he fell in love with a mother of four aged 28. The beautiful Penelope Dimont, née Fletcher, already had two daughters by her husband, Charles Dimont, another by her wartime lover, Kenneth Harrison, and she was now pregnant with a fourth daughter by her latest lover, Randall Swingler. (A man had only to hang his trousers over the end of the bed, as Penelope said, for her to become pregnant.)

When they married in 1947, both were about to publish their first novels, and she was the next important influence on his life. The media became obsessed by the writing pair and their large brood (six children by 1955) living in Hampstead in chaotic domesticity.

Life was turbulent, punctuated by dramatic rows and reconciliations, usually caused by the “hints and confessions, implausible excuses, furtive mutterings on the phone” during John’s forays into the theatre, “which supplied a succession of accessible girlfriends”, as Penelope, an inveterate diarist, wrote.

Both plundered their marriage in their work. John’s 1973 play Collaborators was his version. But in 1962, Penelope’s The Pumpkin Eater dissected their life with an unsparing honesty.

Later filmed with a script by Harold Pinter, it told the story of a screenwriter husband’s affair with an actress, and the actress’s pregnancy coinciding with his wife’s abortion and sterilisation.

In real life, John’s affair with the actress Wendy Craig, star of his latest West End play, produced a son, just after Penelope had been aborted and sterilised. It was not until their marriage was long over and he was happily married to “Penny Two”, with two more daughters, that he met, at the age of 82, Ross, his 42-year-old son by Wendy.

Given John’s elisions and excisions as a memoirist, it was fortuitous for me that an unauthorised biography appeared two years ago. Graham Lord’s inquiries caused Wendy Craig to contact her former lover in 2004, and John to go public on the welcome discovery of this likeable son who so resembled him, and of whose existence he claimed to be unaware.

By now John was adept at self-deception, erasing unpleasant or inconvenient matters from his mind.

“When John doesn’t want to know something,” the forthright Penny told me, “he doesn’t know it.” As one commentator said at the time, if a footballer was caught cheating on his wife he would be labelled a love-rat. John, national treasure, escaped censure. But in several works he had already written about a son whose paternity is in dispute; in Felix and the Underworldhis writer protagonist is accused of fathering a love-child, causing headlines and publicity that revitalise his flagging reputation. (This proved highly prescient.) Ross grew up believing he was the son of Wendy’s husband Jack Bentley. His mother said that Bentley, on his deathbed in 1994, had implored her never to speak about it. So it was not until September 2004 that Wendy went to lunch with John and Penny.

Ross did not wish to intrude on their lives, said Wendy; but they urged otherwise and things moved swiftly. Ross telephoned John, and told Penny: “Penny, do you realise I’ve spoken to my father for the first time in my life.” When he arrived at Turville Heath Cottage, Penny greeted him – “Welcome to the family” – and led him into John’s study, where the two exchanged a manly British handshake.

Ross spied a signed photo of Fred Astaire, given to John by his daughter Emily, and said: “I have an album of Stacey Kent singing Fred Astaire songs. I was listening to it before I came. John pressed the play button of his stereo – and he had the same CD on!” Photographs of Ross taken that day revealed that he looked more like his father than any of John’s other children.

© Valerie Grove 2007

Extracted from A Voyage Around John Mortimer, to be published by Penguin on October 25 at £25.

[Long Gone Day]

Very..interesting....Linnie.....Thank..you..for..that....

[neilmpenny]

She, whom must be obeyed!