Sir John Mortimer | British writer and lawyer | Britannica.com British writer and lawyer Alternative Title: Sir John Clifford Mortimer Sir John Mortimer Caroline Norton Sir John Mortimer, in full Sir John Clifford Mortimer (born April 21, 1923, Hampstead, London , Eng.—died Jan. 16, 2009, near Henley-on-Thames , Oxfordshire, Eng.), English barrister and writer who wrote plays for the stage, television, radio , and motion pictures, as well as novels and autobiographical works. John Mortimer, c. 1971. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Mortimer was educated at Harrow and at Brasenose College, Oxford , and began writing before he was called to the bar in 1948. In 1949 he married Penelope Ruth Fletcher (the novelist Penelope Mortimer ; divorced 1972). Mortimer began his writing career as a novelist, with Charade (1947). Many of his short stories and novels drew on his legal experience, and the television production of his play The Dock Brief established his reputation.

Mortimer wrote many other plays, including The Wrong Side of the Park (performed 1960) and The Judge (performed 1967). He successfully adapted the farce A Flea in Her Ear (1965, from Georges Feydeau) and the novel Brideshead Revisited (1981, from Evelyn Waugh). One of his finest works is A Voyage Round My Father (1970), an autobiographical play about his relationship with his blind father. Throughout his writing career Mortimer maintained a thriving law practice and became known as one of Great Britain’s principal defenders in free-speech and civil-rights cases. As a writer he had popular success in the late 1970s and ’80s with the television series Rumpole of the Bailey and short stories featuring the crusty old British barrister Horace Rumpole . His novels include Paradise Postponed (1985) and Dunster (1992). Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) is a frank autobiography . Mortimer was knighted in 1998.

Learn More in these related articles: Obituary: Sir John Mortimer | Culture | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close The barrister, playwright and author Sir John Mortimer , who has died aged 85, was a man for all the seasons that touched his Chilterns garden, where he lived as profusely as he wrote, in a spirit of unjudgmental generosity. His greatest achievement was to create, in Rumpole of the Bailey, a lawyer whom the world would love. Though born in Hampstead, north London, John grew up in the house at Turville, near Henley, Oxfordshire, that he never really left. His father was an irascible, blind barrister, the Mortimer of Mortimer on Wills, Probate and Divorce. His mother, devoted and stoic, read aloud the sad, true stories of cruelty and passion between the wars contained in his father's briefs for the divorce court.

John, an only child, was sent to the Dragon school at Oxford, in a class with the historian EP Thompson and a "sour-faced boy who wouldn't share his tuck", who grew up to become a severe circuit judge and model for Rumpole's adversary, Judge Bullingdon. Home from Harrow, the teenager wracked his imagination to stage theatricals that his father might "see" – his contribution to the stiff upper-lipped family pretence that Clifford Mortimer was not blind. In Henley, he encountered with interest the bookshop-owning lesbians who had taken opium with Cocteau, and a prim, elderly lady who had, in her youth, urinated regularly upon pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis. He determined to be a writer, and on leaving school joined the Crown Film Unit, devising accounts of industrial and military Britain in wartime. But Clifford had other ideas, a clash captured in A Voyage Round My Father, the account by John of their relationship that first surfaced on BBC radio in 1963: "Father: ... if you were only a writer, who would you rub shoulders with? (with contempt) Other writers? You'll be far better off in the law.

Son: I don't know. Father: No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails. Another thing, if you were a writer, think of your poor, unfortunate wife... Son: What? Father: She'd have you at home every day! In carpet slippers... Drinking tea and stumped for words! You'd be far better off down the tube each morning, and off to the law courts... the law of husband and wife may seem idiotic at first sight but when you get to know it, you'll find it can exercise a vague, medieval charm. Learn a little law, won't you? Just to please me.

Son: It was my father's way to offer the law to me – the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages – as if it were a small mechanical toy which might occupy half an hour on a rainy afternoon." When Britain's other 1960s playwrights examined their fathers – Peter Nicholls despairingly in Forget-Me-Not Lane, David Mercer bitterly in After Heggarty - A Voyage Round My Father stood out, not only for its stagecraft and for Alec Guinness's central performance, but for the unquestioning love distilled in its lines for this man who had refused to show any to his son. Many young people ruin what would otherwise be talented and useful lives by devoting themselves to law, and John at the time felt himself to be one of them (he was always remarking on the irony of leaving the artificial atmosphere of the court at 4.30pm for the real life of theatre rehearsals). Yet practice of law, although it sapped the early development of his writing skills, eventually gave him the experience which produced his greatest character.

After Brasenose College, Oxford, and at war's end, love and law came hand in hand. He was called to the bar in 1948 and in the following year married Penelope Fletcher, taking on her four existing children and adding two of their own. They wrote a travel book together, With Love and Lizards (1957) and novels separately, as he struggled to develop a practice. Soon he discovered a real talent for divorcing people (in those barbaric, fault-finding days before divorce reform), and for the arcane Chancery world in which time and talent is expended in deciding the validity of a will written on a duck egg, or the charitable status of a legacy to Trappist nuns. After the series of half-hour radio plays, John adapted A Voyage Round My Father for television (1969, with Mark Dignam and Ian Richardson as father and son), then the stage (1971, with Guinness and Jeremy Brett) and then back into a film for television (1982, with Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates). It returned to the West End stage in 2006 with Derek Jacobi and Dominic Rowan.

However, John's first stage success, A Dock Brief – set in the cells, where an incompetent barrister counsels himself and his convicted client – was rooted in his own nervousness about failure and his permanent terror at having responsibility for another's fate. For this reason, he avoided the criminal law until reform dried up his contested divorce work, and he had no alternative but to go "down the Bailey". By the end of the 1960s he had a considerable reputation as a novelist (his first, Charade, drawing on his Crown Film Unit experience, and unrelated to the movie, appeared in 1947) and playwright, and had played an important role in the abolition of the death penalty and the passage of the Theatres Act, which saw off that bane of the British stage, the Lord Chamberlain's power of censorship – not that his own work had ever been in danger from this quarter. An irony of his leadership of the anti-censorship movement was his profound belief that anything at all should be capable of being said about sex, coupled with his own reluctance to deal in his work with anything other than its consequence.

Sex was an amusing but bemusing fact of life: "The whole business has been overestimated by the poets." This was not, one feels, an attitude shared by Penelope. Theirs was, in fact, a remarkable marriage, although its final stages were somewhat bitterly reflected by Penelope in her novel The Home (1971). John, typically, celebrated more of the fun and laughter in his play Collaborators (1973), in which the couple metamorphosed into characters played by Glenda Jackson and John Wood. By this time, John was a successful silk - he had become QC in 1966 - having reinvented himself as an advocate in murder trials. He found a macabre fascination in the pattern of bloodstains, and acquired a singular ability to charm expert prosecution witnesses out of their preconceptions. He was the greatest cross-examiner of such experts ("the art of cross-examination is not to examine crossly") and many alleged murderers owed their liberty to his ability to draw out a doubt in the apparently closed mind.

But nothing in the training of the English bar and bench had equipped it for the underground press, and when, in 1971, a largely unreadable magazine called Oz published a cartoon strip featuring Rupert Bear with an erection, its editors were treated as if they had committed treason. QCs, their cab-rank principles forgotten, fled from the proffered defence brief. A few days before the trial – for conspiracy to corrupt public morals, an offence carrying a maximum of life imprisonment – Richard Neville and I showed John the offending publication while he was lunching a young woman, also named Penelope. They giggled. We begged him to take the case. "Goody," was his response. Thus began his second life, as defender of the apparently indefensible, as creator of Rumpole and much else besides, and, from 1972, following his divorce, as husband of Penelope Gollop, Penny the second, and father of Emily and Rosie. His first wife died in 1999.

Two autobiographies, Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) and Murderers and Other Friends (1994) speak of a life anchored in family, yet lived in a daily dramatic jumble of court cases, plays and television series, sharply observing the vanities of the world through the blur of diminishing eyesight. John retired from the bar in 1981. Rumpole was the barrister he wanted to be, but wasn't. He was too nervous – petrified before a big case, and diffident about his own abilities. However, his final speeches, meticulously handwritten, were minor works of literature. Almost alone at the bar, he could laugh a case out of court (had he stayed, he would have made a fortune in libel defences).

His forensic contribution to the Oz case was effectively to end censorship for the written word, first for literature, by arguing the appeal which freed Last Exit to Brooklyn (the 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr that was prosecuted under obscenity laws for its treatment of sex, drugs and violence), then by persuading the jury to reject the moral corruption charge, and going on to demolish, at the appeal, Judge Michael Argyle's directions on obscenity. Of course pornography corrupted – starting with the policemen charged with enforcing the laws against it, many of whom were later jailed for taking bribes. John put on his wig and took off his glasses, so he could not see some of the trash he was called upon to defend with a success that drew rage from Mary Whitehouse and an extravagant attack from the Times, which claimed that no jury was immune to his charm.

The Williams committee on obscenity, reporting in 1980, agreed with Kenneth Tynan in crediting John with achieving a de facto freedom for the written word by his victorious defence of Inside Linda Lovelace (1973), a shabby little book that would have gone unnoticed had the DPP's office not decided to dignify it with a prosecution, after which it sold a million copies. From dawn each day John would be at work on his supreme creation, Rumpole of the Bailey. Horace Rumpole had, like all great fictional characters, been composed from fragments of the real people John had worked with, his father, and James Burge (a mercurial Old Bailey junior who never quite recovered from the professional consequences of defending Stephen Ward during the Profumo scandal in 1963) and Jeremy Hutchinson, a mighty defence silk married at the time to Peggy Ashcroft. In the hands of Leo McKern and Thames Television from 1978 to 1992 (after an initial appearance on the BBC in 1975), and in novels that continued till 2006, Rumpole achieved international acclaim.

There are Rumpole societies of lawyers basking undeservedly in his popularity from Los Angeles to Perth. Rumpole is, perhaps, the first truly Dickensian character to emerge from the medium of television. There remains one great virtue about him - his independence - along with much that has, for good reason, passed away. If Rumpole returned today, he would still not be made a silk. The new appointments board displays a marked bias towards appointing prosecutors rather than defenders to the rank of Queens Counsel. John worked on, long after leaving the bar, meticulous as ever. He came to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg with us in 1995 to research the law and the restaurants that feature in Rumpole and the Rights of Man, and more recent volumes had the bewildered barrister grappling with Asbos and terrorism control orders. Too full of ideas to sleep, he started work on a new film or novel or play – or all at the same time – at 5am, ending in time for long gossipy lunches with friends and family, followed by theatre and parties in London.

In the capital, he has in recent years served as culture's Queen Mother, gracing the National Theatre, the Royal Opera, the Royal Ivy and the Royal Court with his comfortingly unchanging, beaming presence. It is a sorry reflection on his political friends that he was never made Lord Mortimer of Turville, although he was knighted in 1998. Later works included tales of the opportunist Thatcherite politician Leslie Titmuss, Paradise Postponed (1985, televised 1986) and Titmuss Regained (1990, televised 1991); Summer's Lease (1988, televised 1989), set in Tuscany, and Dunster (1992), about an adversarial friendship that culminates in a court case. For Covent Garden he translated Die Fledermaus (1989), for the RSC, adapted A Christmas Carol (1994), and for OUP he produced The Oxford Book of Villains (1992).

The older he became, the more determined he was to cudgel his mind for any idea that might amuse a reader, while continuing to champion the causes for which he cared – the Howard League for Penal Reform, the Royal Court Theatre, and a holiday home for deprived children that he and Penny helped to establish in Turville. Politically, his faith in liberal socialism wavered at the end. He had emerged from his one-member Communist cell at Harrow to a postwar Labour party he supported with increasing conviction as the Thatcher years changed Britain for the worse. Once the joker, jotting his contributions to the satirical BBC TV comedy That Was The Week That Was during idle afternoons in court in the early 1960s, he and Penny teamed up with Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser to found the 20 June group in 1987 – reviled almost as viciously in the Tory press as it was by those on the left who were not invited to join. Although saddened by the 1992 election loss, he was increasingly uncertain about Tony Blair and his talent for turning the Labour into the war party. In 2005 he broke the habit of a lifetime, and voted Liberal Democrat.

The previous year an unauthorised biography by Graham Lord produced a delightful result. It stirred some embers, from which emerged, fully-formed, a lost son, the hidden fruit of a 60s affair with the actor Wendy Craig. It was a happy discovery for both men, and later a proper biography, A Voyage Round John Mortimer (2007), by Valerie Grove did her subject justice, capturing some of the pleasures of the Mortimer caravanserai: the long Sunday lunches at Turville in winter, the bluebell picnics in Chiltern woods every spring; the summer idylls in that part of Italy he dubbed Chiantishire. In the last years, age wearied everything except his mind. His rotund face collapsed, his limbs and bladder gave up, bedtime became a ritual of excruciating pain, yet he continued writing and performing, as if for dear life. Mortimer's Miscellany ran for a month at the King's Head, Islington, north London, in 2007. A doctor's warning that the run might kill him only excited him at the prospect of dying like Dickens.

He strove to keep his jokes up to date, although (like the law) they lagged by a decade. (Judge comes into court confessing he has left the judgment he is meant to read in his country cottage. "Fax it up, m'lord," says counsel. "Yes it does, rather.") His final years brought reminders of his permanent contribution to the English stage, with the much praised production of Voyage with Jacobi, followed in 2007-08 by Edward Fox in the double bill of Dock Brief and Edwin, first aired as a radio play in 1982, about a retired judge obsessed by the notion that his friend and neighbour may have been the father of his son. The house in Turville Heath had acquired a conservatory, for Olivier to pot earwigs in the television version of Voyage. Every weekend until his death it became a place of laughter and gossip and gumboots and children, with friends who felt privileged (although they were never made to feel privileged) to inspect the garden and walk in the wood and sip tea and champagne and talk of everything except Michelangelo, with the Renaissance man who had been saved from terminal decadence by his Reformation wife.

Much of his work in the last half of his life, and much of his continuing happiness, was inspired by Penny the second, whose enormous strengths of decency and determination creatively challenged his own vacillation and reluctance to make moral judgments. The result may be seen in his work, and in his family: actress Emily and model Rosie (daughters with Penny II); Radio 4 producer Jeremy and social worker Sally (with Penny I) and law/IT consultant Ross Bentley, his long-lost son. John Clifford Mortimer, barrister playwright and author, born 21 April 1923; died 16 January 2009 Sir John Mortimer: Writer by choice, lawyer at his father's behest - Telegraph Sir John Mortimer dies 16 Jan 2009 Extraordinarily for a barrister who won so many cases, Rumpole remained an outcast at the Bar; while Mortimer, who claimed to find failure more attractive than success, rigorously eschewed its seductions in his own career. Where Rumpole remained in awe of “she who must be obeyed”, Mortimer brought a cheerful hedonism to bear on life’s trials.

“Loyalty,” he once declared, “is a stultifying emotion.” Yet the experiences of fictional barrister and his creator did coalesce at some points. Rumpole’s delight in needling judges, and his penchant for quotation, recalled Mortimer’s father. And like Mortimer himself he combined a deep respect for the English legal system with a consistent refusal to accept a Crown prosecution. “Rumpole would have got me off,” one defendant told Mortimer, “why couldn’t you?” Nevertheless, both Rumpole and Mortimer showed a distinct preference for unorthodox clients, liberal causes and anti-Establishment values.” For many years Mortimer earned his crust at the Bar from testamentary and divorce work. But after taking Silk in 1966 he ventured into criminal law, and became almost the obligatory counsel for the defence in cases where public morals seemed to be at stake. In 1968 he successfully defended John Calder and Marion Boyars on appeal from their conviction for obscenity after publishing Herbert Selby Jnr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Three years later he appeared, unsuccessfully, for Richard Handyside, publisher of The Little Red Book, which offered children advice on drugs, sex and venereal disease.

Later in 1971 he defended the publishers of Oz after their “Schoolkids” edition had depicted Rupert Bear in a state of high priapic excitement. The prison sentences handed out at the Old Bailey were set aside in the Court of Appeal. In 1976 the porn actress Linda Lovelace availed herself of Mortimer’s services after her autobiography, Inside Linda Lovelace, had landed her in court. In this instance, though, Mortimer’s triumph in the liberal cause was mitigated by subsequent revelations that Linda Lovelace had been an unwilling slave to a pornographer. The next year Mortimer defended Denis Lemon, the editor of Gay News, against a charge of blasphemy — the first such prosecution to the brought for half a century — after the paper had published a poem descriptive of the physical passion of a Roman centurion for Christ on the Cross. Lemon was given a suspended prison sentence and fined £500. Mortimer found this sentence, which was confirmed in the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, outrageous. But he declared that he was rather fond of Mary Whitehouse, who had been praying for a conviction. In his later years at the Bar, Mortimer defended several murderers.

But there was always a deliberate touch of amateurism about his performance in court. “I made a point of looking scruffy,” he recalled. “I didn’t want juries to think I was some sort of conventional lawyer.” At the end of one case he congratulated the jury on having sat through the most boring trial ever to have been held in the criminal court. “It may surprise you to know, members of the jury,” the judge began in his summing up, “that the sole purpose of the criminal law in England is not to entertain Mr Mortimer.” It sometimes seemed that Mortimer regarded not merely the Bar but also his whole existence as a form of playacting. The causes he adopted, though maintained with intellectual resource, often seemed to conflict with his instincts. A professed atheist (albeit “an atheist for Christ”), he was obsessed by the possibility of God, and belaboured those whom he interviewed with questions about their faith. A dedicated opponent of censorship, he admitted that he was sickened by pornography. A devoted father, he supported more liberal divorce laws.

Politically a man of the Left, he expressed a Whiggish distaste for the material aspirations of his social inferiors — “I do not especially like the working-class Tory” — while himself rising at 5am every morning to gain the wherewithal for his own opulent tastes. Mortimer cheerfully admitted to being a champagne socialist; genial and unruffled as ever, he held that he wanted everyone to have champagne and was pro-hunting. Naturally, he was a founder member of the 20th of June Group, which first gathered in Harold and Lady Antonia Pinter’s Campden Hill Square drawing room on that date in 1988 to plot the downfall of Thatcherism. In truth, rather than confront the awkward facts of existence, Mortimer preferred to adapt them to the make-believe of the theatre, where the rougher edges might be stylishly smoothed to his satisfaction. His most successful play, A Voyage Round My Father, was a skilful, witty and touching evocation of his extraordinary parent.

Mortimer senior was a barrister who devoted his formidable will and intellect to shutting out reality, and liked to converse in Shakespearean tags — “Is execution done on Cawdor?” Though given to raging fury over petty inconveniences, he resolutely refused (like his son) to take important matters seriously — to such an extent that within the family no allusion was ever made to the fact that he was totally blind. This did not prevent his being fanatically devoted to his herbaceous border. A Voyage Round My Father was first performed on television in 1969, with Mark Dignam giving a superb account of the father. He repeated the triumph the next year at the Greenwich Theatre, but when the play opened at the Haymarket in 1971 Sir Alec Guinness was in the lead; later he was replaced by Sir Michael Redgrave. In the television version, made in 1982, Laurence Olivier played the part, acting the death scene in the very bed and very room where Mortimer senior had died. Mortimer had achieved a perfect synthesis of reality and art.

“I’ve seldom had a real success that hasn’t in some way been to do with either the law or my father or both,” he reflected in the early 1980s. Even his script for the television version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (screened in 1981) was much concerned with fathers, Charles Ryder’s being played by Sir John Gielgud, and Sebastian Flyte’s by Lord Olivier. Mortimer earned much praise for this script, although Brideshead’s producer, Derek Granger, maintained that he and a colleague had had to rewrite it. After retiring from the Bar in 1984 Mortimer wrote several novels. He had already published a series of Rumpole books, and if readers were tempted at first sight to dismiss them as mere spin-offs from the television series they soon discovered that the author was as accomplished between hard covers as on the screen. But Mortimer had other fish to fry. A fervent patriot, given to claiming that “we live in the most beautiful, most tolerant and most politically mature country in the world”, he reacted sharply against what he saw as the moral degradation of the Thatcher years.

“Comedy is the only thing worth writing in this despairing age,” he declared. Paradise Postponed, published in 1985, introduced the monstrous Leslie Titmuss, the representative of all that Mortimer loathed in Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy, and the negation of all the hopes that had been nurtured after the Labour victory of 1945. Yet Mortimer presented Titmuss’s case so well that the book was shown to Labour shadow cabinet members as a warning of the kind of argument they would have to counter. When Paradise Postponed was made into a television series in 1986 — rather too long, with its 11 episodes, though David Threlfall was excellent as Titmuss — it was clear that Mortimer had drawn Tory blood. The industry minister John Butcher reacted by calling him “an upmarket punk who has made money for 15 years by eroding the confidence of the British”. Summer’s Lease (1988) dealt with the vicissitudes of an English family on holiday in Tuscany; appropriately enough Mortimer wrote most of it in a house some 15 miles to the east of Siena.

When the book was televised, in 1989, John Gielgud played Haverford Downs, a lecherous old journalist who foists himself on the family. Mortimer returned to his political theme with Titmuss Regained (1990), in which the protagonist, now minister of housing, ecological affairs and planning, is required to decide on planning permission for a new town in Rapstone Valley. “Mortimer Lost,” wrote David Holloway in The Daily Telegraph. “It is not enough to deride the world, to refuse to acknowledge that anyone can be happy, or that anyone can act out of altruism.” In his life, Mortimer’s sympathy for the underdog rebutted any suggestion of shallow cynicism; from 1991 to 2003, for instance, he was President of the Howard League for Penal Reform. In his writing, though, he was seized by a very English terror of being over-serious. His compulsive need to make jokes — even though they were often very good jokes — reflected the nihilism at the root of his nature.

“I am not by nature a truly convinced person,” he once admitted, “I’m never actually sold a million per cent on anything.” Cardinal Hume once put it to him that, if there was no God, life would be absurd. “Well, exactly,” Mortimer returned. An only child, John Clifford Mortimer was born on April 21 1923. His father’s family hailed from the West Country, until his grandfather, a Bristol brewer, signed the pledge and became an estate agent in South Africa. His father returned to England at 17 and married Kathleen Smith, an artist from Leamington Spa with progressive views, Young John was educated at the Dragon School and Harrow, where he marked his individuality by joining the Communist Party. He had some hope of becoming an actor; and at other times spoke of becoming a writer, an ambition which his father (who became blind in 1936) sharply discouraged. “My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife,” Mortimer senior would advise. “You’ll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing-gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You’ll be far better off in the Law.

That’s the great thing about the Law, it gets you out of the house.” So, without any great conviction, Mortimer achieved a wartime Law degree at Brasenose College, Oxford. Military service was precluded by medical examination, which established that he had appalling sight and doubtful lungs. He also appeared to be wasting away, a process which, as he remarked in later years, “now seems to have gone into reverse”. Back in London, Mortimer joined the Crown Film Unit and graduated to the script department, where he wrote documentaries designed to boost the war effort. He also found time to work on his first novel, Charade (1947), which drew heavily on his experience in the studios. Bowing at the end of the war to his father’s will, he began to read for the Bar exams, financing himself at one time by taking a job teaching English to French models in Paris. Then he joined his father’s chambers, where he began by drafting the less sensational divorce applications at £5 a throw.

The novels — Rumming Park (1948), Answer Yes or No (1950), Like Men Betrayed (1953) and Three Winters (1956) — continued to flow. But, having acquired four stepdaughters by marriage, two children of his own shortly afterwards, and a large house in Swiss Cottage, Mortimer was seriously strapped for cash. Somehow he found time to write for women’s magazines, to produce a history of costume for Moss Bros, and to provide captions for the Festival of Britain. But he did not make a breakthrough as a writer until the BBC producer Nesta Pain cajoled him into producing plays for radio. The first, I Spy (1957), was about a private detective who is sent to find evidence of adultery and falls in love with the wife. The second, Dock Brief (1957), which included a barrister who was a distant ancestor of Rumpole, won the Italia Prize.

“At last,” Mortimer realised, “I was writing what I had wanted, all my life, to say.” He added another play, What Shall We Tell Caroline?, as a companion piece to Dock Brief, and in 1958 they formed a double bill first at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and then at the Garrick. Mortimer confirmed his budding reputation as a playwright with various pieces for television, including Call Me A Liar (1958), in which Alec McCowen played a character whose habitual mendacity arose from a fear of being pitied; David and Broccoli (1960), in which a timid but intelligent schoolboy squared accounts with a boorish teacher; and Collect Your Handbaggage (1961), in which Alec Guinness made his British television debut. Mortimer’s first full-length play in the West End, The Wrong Side of the Park (Cambridge, 1960), was a wry examination of marriage, in which a wife presents an idealised portrait of her first husband to her second husband, whom she bullies; it transpires, nevertheless, that she had been committing adultery with him when she heard of the first husband’s death.

Lunch Hour (Arts and Criterion, 1961), a short play which formed part of a triple bill (the other two were by Harold Pinter and NF Simpson), described a tryst in a hotel at King’s Cross between a respectably married businessman and — as he talks about the wife he is betraying — an increasingly unwilling secretary. The secretary was played by Wendy Craig, with whom Mortimer had an affair; and decades later, in 2004, it was revealed that they had had a son. His play Two Stars For Comfort (Garrick, 1962) presented Trevor Howard as the manager of a Thames riverside hotel who feeds other people’s fantasies in order to avoid confronting his own problems, which include the fact that his wife is about to leave him once and for all. In 1965 A Flea in Her Ear — Mortimer’s earthy and raw translation of Georges Feydeau’s La Puce à l’oreille — enjoyed great success at the National. Two years later The Judge, in which the protagonist is confronted with the sexual sins of his youth, had a short run at the Cambridge theatre.

Come As You Are (New Theatre, 1969) was a series of four short plays united by the theme of the eternal triangle. They presented four varieties of love — transvestite in Mill Hill, homosexual in Bermondsey, fantasy-ridden in Gloucester Road and middle-aged in Marble Arch; needless to say, the author’s message was impeccably liberal. This was followed later that year by Cat Among the Pigeons, another Feydeau translation, at the Prince of Wales theatre. For the National in 1971 Mortimer adapted Zuckmayer’s The Captain of Köpenick, and the next year his version of Robert Graves’s I Claudius played at the Queen’s Theatre. Heaven and Hell (Greenwich, 1976) was a programme of two plays. In Heaven, two Englishmen wake up after an accident in a hospital housed in a Tuscan palazzo, and deduce from the sumptuous fresco on the ceiling that they have arrived in heaven. Hell introduces a military padre who talks breezily of sin and the devil and who can apparently work miracles.

The play was expanded in The Bells of Hell (Garrick, 1977), which beneath its hilarious guise raised serious problems about faith. The Collaborators (Duchess, 1973) portrayed with characteristic irony and humour a couple working on a film about their own marriage. There may have been an autobiographical element in the portrait of matrimonial discord, although Mortimer’s wife Penelope’s novel The Home suggests a rather more tempestuous breach than he acknowledged. In 1984 A Little Hotel on the Side, Mortimer’s translation of Feydeau’s L’Hotel du Libre Echange, repeated the success of A Flea in Her Ear at the National. In 1989 he produced a new version of Die Fledermaus for the English National Opera. In 1994 his adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol afforded seasonal fare at the Barbican.

His later plays included Summer of a Dormouse (for radio, 1999); Naked Justice (2001); Hock and Soda Water (2001); Full House (2002); The Hairless Diva (adapted from Ionesco, 2002); and Legal Fictions (2008). Meanwhile Mortimer had continued to write for television. Shades of Greene (1975) were adaptations of Graham Greene; Will Shakespeare (1978) was a series of six fictional stories about the poet’s life; Unity (1981) was a portrait of Unity Mitford largely taken from David Pryce-Jones’s biography. Mortimer scripted screen versions of Graham Greene’s Dr Fischer of Geneva (1982) and John Fowles’s Ebony Tower (1984). His play Edwin (Channel 4, 1984, from an earlier radio play) featured Alec Guinness as a retired high court judge and Paul Rogers as a potter arguing about who has sired Edwin. In 1998 he adapted for television Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie.

Among Mortimer’s film scripts were The Innocents (1961, with Turman Capote and William Archibald); The Running Man (1963); Bunny Lake Is Missing (1964, with Penelope Mortimer); A Flea in Her Ear (1967); John and Mary (1969); and Tea with Mussolini (1999). As a journalist, Mortimer proved a masterly interviewer, mainly for The Sunday Times; these pieces were subsequently published in two volumes, In Character (1983) an Character Parts (1986). In 1987 he wrote a series for The Daily Telegraph under the title John Mortimer’s Almanack. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium Mortimer published more stories about Rumpole. He wrote four volumes of discursive autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage (1982), Murderers and Other Friends (1994), The Summer of a Dormouse (2000) and Where There’s a Will (2003). In 1992 he edited The Oxford Book of Villains.

He was Master of the Bench at the Inner Temple in 1975, a member of the National Theatre Board from 1968 to 1988, chairman of the Royal Society of Literature from 1990 to 2000, and chairman of the Royal Court Theatre from 1990 to 2000. He was appointed CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1998. John Mortimer married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1972), Penelope Fletcher, with whom he had a son and a daughter. He married secondly, in 1972, Penelope Gollop; they had two daughters. British Writer, Lawyer John Mortimer Dead at 85 | Fox News British Writer, Lawyer John Mortimer Dead at 85 Published January 16, 2009 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 livefyre Email Print 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." Wit, flirt, genius: John Mortimer dies aged 85 | The Independent Wit, flirt, genius: John Mortimer dies aged 85 His prodigious talent straddled the worlds of literature, law, and politics. John Walsh reports. Saturday 17 January 2009 00:00 BST Click to follow Wit, flirt, genius: John Mortimer dies aged 85 1/2 2/2 GETTY IMAGES Sir John Mortimer, Queen's Counsel, barrister, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, author, playwright, champagne socialist, wit, defender of free speech, wine connoisseur, devoted luncher, national treasure and lord of Chiantishire, has died at the age of 85. He had been ill for some years and confined to a wheelchair, but it never prevented him from writing at a headlong pace (he published more than one book a year) or traversing the country to speak at festivals and public events. He died at his home in the village of Turville Heath, near Henley, Oxfordshire, where he had lived, on and off, since he was a child.

His voice was utterly distinctive: a high, hesitant, slightly camp delivery in which he would muse on the state of the legislature or confide some shocking piece of theatrical gossip. He was funny, subversive, kind, single-minded, rather vain (despite his unorthodox looks and bottle-bottom spectacles), shockingly flirtatious with women and extremely keen on having an audience. He straddled the worlds of advocacy and showbusiness with ease, but will probably be remembered most for creating a grouchy, middle-aged, ash-stained, poetry-quoting, claret-bibbing, henpecked defence lawyer called Horace Rumpole and pitching him into court battles on behalf of mainly under-class clients, whom he saved from perdition. Like Rumpole, Mortimer himself took on only defence cases. Although his legal work was overshadowed by his status as a bestseller, he was a stalwart fighter for freedom and against censorship. Often accused of being a "champagne socialist", he was a passionate liberal all his life. He was born in Hampstead, north London, went to Harrow School and read law at Brasenose College, Oxford.

His father, perhaps the most important figure in his life, was Clifford Mortimer, a divorce barrister who went blind one day when he hit his head on a tree branch. Mortimer wrote and talked obsessively about him; his best play was A Voyage Around My Father. In his one-man show, he would reminisce about his dad's puckish sense of humour – how, in crowded train carriages, he would demand that his wife, Kathleen, read out detailed news reports of current divorce trials, delighted to imagine his fellow travellers' mortification at every mention of "garments", "stains" and "bloomers". During the Second World War, he was attached to the Crown Film Unit at Pinewood Studios, writing propaganda documentaries. It was the making of him as a playwright. "I was given great and welcome opportunities," he wrote later, "to write dialogue, construct scenes and try and turn ideas into some kind of visual drama." His first novel, Charade (1947) was based on his experience with the unit. Mortimer was called to the Bar in 1948 and married Penelope Fletcher, a divorcee with four children, a year later.

They were married for 22 years but it was stormy union, anatomised in detail in Penelope's novel The Pumpkin Eater. The story of a serial child-bearer married to a philandering screenwriter, of their literary rivalry and endless bust-ups, set the template for the so-called Hampstead Novel for a generation. It also contained an ungenerous pen portrait of the second Mrs Mortimer – also called Penelope – whom he married in 1972 and with whom he had two more daughters (including the actress Emily Mortimer). It later transpired that Mortimer fathered another child in the early 1960s from a secret relationship with Wendy Craig, the wholesome star of TV sitcoms such as Butterflies. The story of his paternity emerged in an unauthorised biography, published by Graham Lord in 2004. ("Rumpy-Pumpy at the Bailey," observed one tabloid newspaper.) The child, named Ross, was brought up by Craig and her husband, Jack Bentley, as their own. The news of Ross's existence came as a complete surprise to Mortimer, who nonetheless welcomed the addition to his growing brood.

His debut as a playwright was The Dock Brief, broadcast on BBC Radio, starring a harrumphing Michael Hordern as an ineffectual barrister. A Voyage Round My Father followed in 1963 and made Mortimer's reputation, but he was also finding fame for his powerful advocacy in court. He appeared for the defence in the legendary Lady Chatterley's Lover trial in 1960. When Sir Cyril Black, a Tory MP, brought a private prosecution against the publisher of Hubert Selby Jnr's Last Exit To Brooklyn under the Obscene Publications Act in 1966, the case went to trial at the Old Bailey and the book was ruled obscene. In 1968, Mortimer appealed against the decision and his passionate defence saw the verdict overturned. He wrestled with obscenity laws again in 1971 when Oz magazine was accused of "conspiracy to corrupt public morals" and the ensuing trial became a cause célèbre, the longest obscenity trial in British history.

On the first day, Mortimer declared: "This case stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and write and draw what we please." He defended Gay News against Mary Whitehouse's charge of blasphemy, stood up for the makers of the Linda Lovelace porn movie Deep Throat, and in 1977 defended the Sex Pistols and Virgin Records when they were prosecuted for using the dreaded B-word on the cover of their first album, Never Mind The Bollocks. Although a famous libertarian, he believed in traditions: monarchy, foxhunting, being well-dressed and polite in court. "If you are about to be sent down for life," he once said, "you don't want someone in a T-shirt, jeans and trainers doing it. You want the whole works." His books sometimes dealt in political issues – when Rumpole is confronted by euthanasia or child abuse, or when property developers threaten to ruin Leslie Titmuss's country home in Titmuss Regained – but he never forced home any obvious agenda. Mortimer seemed more regretful and puckishly amused by the folly of human nature than censorious about people's behaviour.

"People will go to endless trouble," he once wrote, "to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything." Although he was knighted in 1997, he turned against Tony Blair and New Labour, taking regular shots at the prime minister, whom he saw as shamelessly curbing personal freedoms. Rumpole Of The Bailey started life as a BBC Play For Today in 1975. It starred the saurian Australian actor Leo McKern as Rumpole (apparently modelled on the playwright's father) and was an instant hit. A television series for Thames TV swiftly followed (the BBC foolishly passed on it) and spawned another three series between 1978 and 1992, when McKern died. The shows were huge commercial successes, as were the books that followed. Mrs Thatcher's accession to power spurred Mortimer to action in a series of novels looking nostalgically at an England he saw as threatened by the Iron Lady. Paradise Postponed introduced the oleaginous figure of Leslie Titmuss, a horrible Tory MP on the make.

When I was a literary editor, it was one of the delights of the job to take Mortimer to lunch at The Ivy. No matter how punctual I was, he was always already ensconced at a table, glass of champagne to hand. He would scrutinise a menu he surely knew by heart and say, "I think we should start with the oysters" (my heart would sink as I thought of the bill), then order a main course of liver and bacon, as if to show his solidarity with the common man. He would tell hilariously satirical stories about Mrs Thatcher's Lord Chancellor, whom he always referred to, in full, as Lord Mackay of Clashfern. He loved gossip and tales of sexual intrigue. I remember telling him about a secret liaison between a well-known Irish writer and Princess Margaret, who used to visit the writer in his Clapham flat. "She'd hang around for breakfast?" said Mortimer, wide-eyed. "Imagine..." An air of naughtiness hung around him, no matter how successful, rich or distinguished he became. Publicity girls at his various publishing houses could testify to his alarming relish for innuendo.

It was, frankly, no massive surprise when the journalist Molly Parkin, in going public about their affair, revealed Mortimer's fondness for being spanked with a hairbrush. He had a long and fantastically busy life, a massive network of friends, a huge capacity for creative work and an unflagging joie de vivre. What he didn't have was much time or inclination for reflection. His authorised biographer, Valerie Grove, found hardly any letters or diaries in his possession after nearly 80 years of life. Not one of his myriad friends, she said, could show her a single letter they'd received from him since 1944. But he believed in the joys of the convivium: every summer he would decamp with his family to Tuscany, which he christened Chiantishire, and hold court at dinner every night, welcoming British friends as if to a castle en fête. It is a good picture with which to remember a quintessential Englishman. More about: John Mortimer - IMDb IMDb Writer | Actor | Producer John Mortimer is a prolific writer for the theatre, films (starting during World War II, when he wrote scripts for the Crown Film Unit), television and radio.

He also writes fiction and was a trial attorney for more than 30 years. Arguably his most famous creation is Horace Rumpole, "barrister at law, 68 next birthday, Old Bailey hack, husband to ... See full bio » Born: "No Small Parts" IMDb Exclusive: 'Manchester by the Sea' Star Casey Affleck Ben Affleck 's younger brother Casey Affleck has been nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in critically-acclaimed drama Manchester by the Sea . Take a look at some of his earlier roles. Don't miss our live coverage of the Golden Globes beginning at 4 p.m. PST on Jan. 8 in our Golden Globes section. a list of 608 people created 15 Jul 2012 a list of 275 people created 07 Oct 2012 Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDbPage How much of John Mortimer's work have you seen? User Polls Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 1 win & 8 nominations.

See more awards » Known For 1990 Die Fledermaus (TV Movie) (English adaptation) Summer's Lease (TV Mini-Series) (novel - 4 episodes, 1989) (screenplay - 4 episodes, 1989) 1984 A Voyage Round My Father (TV Movie) (play) / (screenplay) 1981 Brideshead Revisited (TV Mini-Series) (adaptation - 11 episodes) 1980 Comedy Tonight (TV Movie) 1978 Will Shakespeare (TV Mini-Series) (writer - 6 episodes) 1973 Das Pflichtmandat (TV Movie) (play) 1967-1972 Thirty-Minute Theatre (TV Series) (writer - 5 episodes) - Episode #1.4 (1968) ...

(additional material) 1968 ITV Playhouse (TV Series) (1 episode) 1967 Podnevna pauza (TV Movie) (play) 1967 Eerlijk en ongelogen (TV Movie) (play "Call Me a Liar") 1967 Der Mann aus dem Bootshaus (TV Movie) (novel "The Narrowing Stream") 1967 Armchair Theatre (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode) 1965 BBC 3 (TV Series) 1965 Konversationslexikon (TV Movie) (play) 1963 Der Privatdetektiv (TV Movie) (screenplay) 1963 Playdate (TV Series) (1 episode) 1963 Frokostpause (TV Movie) (based on play) 1963 Back to Back (TV Movie) (plays "What Shall We Tell Caroline?" and "The Dock Brief") 1961 De beklaagde (TV Movie) 1961 Mittagspause (TV Short) (play "Lunch Hour") 1958 Folio (TV Series

) (play 'The Dock Brief' - 1 episode) - Episode #4.1 (1958) ...

(play 'The Dock Brief') 1958 Das Pflichtmandat (TV Movie) (play "The Dock Brief") 1958 Theatre Night (TV Series) (play - 1 episode) Judge at tribunal luncheon table / Theatregoer in bar at the opera during the interval / Guest at Judge's Lunch / ... - Rumpole on Trial (1992) ... Judge at tribunal luncheon table (uncredited) - Rumpole and the Course of True Love (1979) ... Guest at Wedding Reception (uncredited) Hide 2008 Strictly Courtroom (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2007 Burn Hollywood Burn (TV Series documentary) Himself 2007 The Secret Life of Brian (TV Movie documentary) Himself (as Sir John Mortimer) 2004-2006 This Week (TV Series) Himself 2006 War Stories (TV Movie documentary) Himself 2005 The Review Show (TV Series) Himself - Episode dated 25 November 2005 (2005) ...

Himself (as Sir John Mortimer) 2003 Imagine (TV Series documentary) Himself 2002 Breakfast with Frost (TV Series) Himself 2002 Best of British (TV Series) Himself 1999 60 Minutes (TV Series documentary) Himself - Author (segment "Rumpole of the Bailey") 1994 The ABC of Democracy (TV Movie documentary) Himself 1992 Alistair Cooke Salute (TV Movie) Himself 1986 The South Bank Show (TV Series documentary) Himself 1979-1982 Question Time (TV Series) Himself - Episode dated 16 October 1979 (1979) ...

Himself (as John Mortimer QC) 1980 Panorama (TV Series documentary) Himself 1967 The Frost Programme (TV Series) Himself 1960 Monitor (TV Series documentary) Himself Personal Details Other Works: He adapted Georges Feydeau 's play, "Cat Among the Pigeons!", at the Prince of Wales' Theatre in London, England with Elizabeth Seal , Richard Briers , Murray Melvin and Victor Spinetti in the cast. Jacques Charon was the director. See more » Publicity Listings: 5 Print Biographies | 2 Portrayals | 6 Interviews | 82 Articles | See more » Alternate Names: Did You Know? Personal Quote: [on why he preferred defending murderers to handling divorce cases] Matrimonial clients hate each other so much and use their children to hurt each other in beastly ways. Murderers have usually killed the one person in the world that was bugging them and they're usually quite peaceful and agreeable. See more » Trivia: Successfully defended Oz magazine against charges of obscenity in 1971.

See more » Star Sign: BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Rumpole's creator Mortimer dies Rumpole's creator Mortimer dies Cannot play media. Sorry, this media is not available in your territory. Sir John Mortimer's life in pictures Dramatist and author Sir John Mortimer, who created enduring character Rumpole of the Bailey, has died aged 85 after a long illness. Sir John, who began working as a barrister in the 1940s, went on to become one of the most prolific writers of books and screenplays. He first radio play was broadcast in 1957, and later wrote a TV adaptation of Laurie Lee's Cider With Rosie. Sir John, whose daughter is actress Emily Mortimer, was knighted in 1998. His other well-known screen creations included obnoxious Conservative MP Lesley Titmuss, portrayed by actor David Threlfall. 'Whiff of erudition' British writer created Rumpole - latimes YOU ARE HERE: LAT Home → Collections British writer created Rumpole January 17, 2009 |Matt Schudel | Schudel writes for the Washington Post.

John Mortimer, a British lawyer and writer who created the character Horace Rumpole, a disheveled barrister memorably featured in the popular television series "Rumpole of the Bailey," died Friday at his home in Oxfordshire, England. He was 85. The cause of death was not reported. Mortimer, the author of more than 30 works of fiction and dozens of plays, was best known in the United States for the "Rumpole" series, which starred actor Leo McKern as the unkempt defense attorney who had a cast of louts as clients. The comic series was based largely on Mortimer's experiences as one of Britain's leading courtroom advocates and defenders of civil rights and free speech. Rumpole's motto of "Never plead guilty!" was, in fact, Mortimer's own. Referring to his dual career in his 1982 autobiography, "Clinging to the Wreckage," Mortimer claimed "with no particular vanity" to be "the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court." He published his first novel in 1947, a year before he joined the British bar.

Beginning in the 1950s, Mortimer wrote dozens of plays and television scripts. He was credited with writing the screenplay for the acclaimed 1981 British TV miniseries of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited." He also adapted several Graham Greene stories for British television and wrote a screenplay based on John Fowles' novel "The Ebony Tower" for a 1984 television film starring Laurence Olivier. Mortimer's autobiographical play, "A Voyage Round My Father," starring Alec Guinness, was a theatrical hit in London in the early 1970s and was made into a 1982 film with Olivier playing Mortimer's father, an imposingly gruff lawyer. Nonetheless, Mortimer's greatest creation was the grizzled and bemused Rumpole, who first appeared in a 1975 television play. He wore an ill-fitting barrister's wig, trailed cigar smoke and ashes, and could often be found tippling cheap claret in Pommeroy's Wine Bar. With accused killers, burglars, prostitutes, pornographers and schemers of every stripe as his clients, Rumpole triumphed in the most hopeless legal cases.

He outfoxed his opponents in the courtroom, but at home he was constantly browbeaten by his formidable wife, Hilda, better known as "She Who Must Be Obeyed." "Rumpole has customarily been described as a great comic creation," lawyer and critic Marcel Berlins wrote in London's Sunday Times. "He deserves to lose the limiting adjective, comic. He is simply one of the great fictional characters of modern English literature." John Clifford Mortimer was born April 21, 1923, in London. He interrupted his studies at Oxford University during World War II to write propaganda scripts for the British government. Mortimer graduated from Oxford in 1947, joined the British bar a year later and handled all kinds of cases. Over time, he became an expert in free speech issues, successfully defending the British publishers of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn" in landmark obscenity cases.

In 1977, Mortimer successfully defended the Sex Pistols, the punk rock group whose first album's title, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," was deemed obscene by British authorities. He retired from the law in 1986 to devote himself to writing. He rose before 6 a.m., fortified himself with a glass of champagne and produced 1,000 polished words each day. In addition to his Rumpole novels and stories, he published three volumes of memoirs; two collections of interviews with celebrities; and the "Titmuss" trilogy, which was about politics and power in Margaret Thatcher's England and became a popular TV serial in Britain. Mortimer was politically liberal but had a socially conservative bent. He supported the monarchy and fox hunting but was skeptical of feminists. He said he believed in everything about religion except God. His first marriage, to writer Penelope Fletcher Mortimer, ended in divorce. In 2004, Mortimer disclosed that he had a son from an affair in the 1960s with actress Wendy Craig.

The son did not learn of his parentage for more than 40 years, but he and Mortimer had become close. Other survivors include Mortimer's second wife, Penelope Gollop, whom he married in 1972 and called "Penny the Second"; two children from his first marriage; and two daughters from his second marriage, including actress Emily Mortimer. MORE: John Mortimer - Wikipedia, Photos and Videos John Mortimer NEXT GO TO RESULTS [51 .. 100] WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE For people with a similar name, see John Mortimer (disambiguation) . Sir John Mortimer Penelope Gollop (1972-2009; his death) Children Ross Bentley (with actress Wendy Craig ) Four stepdaughters Sir John Clifford Mortimer, CBE , QC (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) [1] was an English barrister , dramatist , screenwriter , and author .

Contents Early life[ edit ] Mortimer was born in Hampstead , London, the only child of Kathleen May ( née Smith) and Clifford Mortimer, a barrister [2] who became blind in 1936, when he hit his head on the door frame of a London taxi, [3] but still pursued his career. Clifford's loss of sight was not acknowledged openly by the family. [4] John Mortimer was educated at the Dragon School , in Oxford , and Harrow School , where he joined the Communist Party [5] forming a one-member cell. [6] Originally Mortimer intended to be an actor; his lead role in the Dragon's 1937 production of Richard II , gained glowing reviews in The Draconian, [6] and then a writer, but his father persuaded him against it advising: "My dear boy, have some consideration for your unfortunate wife ... [the law] gets you out of the house." [5] At seventeen, he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford where he read law, though he was actually based at Christ Church because the Brasenose buildings had been requisitioned for the war effort.

[7] In July 1942, at the end of his second year, he was asked to leave Oxford by the Dean of Christ Church, after romantic letters to a Bradfield College sixth-former, Quentin Edwards, later a QC , [8] were discovered by the young man's housemaster. [6] He graduated from Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts degree in October 1943. [9] Early writing career[ edit ] Mortimer was classified as medically unfit for military service in World War II , with weak eyes and doubtful lungs. [5] He worked for the Crown Film Unit , under Laurie Lee , writing scripts for propaganda documentaries. I lived in London and went on journeys in blacked-out trains to factories and coal-mines and military and air force installations. For the first and, in fact, the only time in my life I was, thanks to Laurie Lee, earning my living entirely as a writer. If I have knocked the documentary ideal, I would not wish to sound ungrateful to the Crown Film Unit. I was given great and welcome opportunities to write dialogue, construct scenes and try and turn ideas into some kind of visual drama.

[10] He based his first novel Charade on his experiences with the Crown Film Unit.[ citation needed ] Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955 with his adaptation of his own novel, Like Men Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme . But he made his debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief , starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister , first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Radio 's Third Programme , later televised with the same cast and subsequently presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre . It was revived by Christopher Morahan in 2007 as part of a touring double bill, Legal Fictions. [11] His play, A Voyage Round My Father , given its first radio broadcast in 1963, is autobiographical , recounting his experiences as a young barrister and his relationship with his blind father. It was memorably televised by BBC Television in 1969 with Mark Dignam in the title role.

In a slightly longer version the play later became a stage success (first at Greenwich Theatre in 1979 with Dignam, then a year later at the Theatre Royal Haymarket , now starring Alec Guinness ). In 1981 it was remade by Thames Television with Laurence Olivier as the father and Alan Bates as young Mortimer. In 1965, he and his wife wrote the screenplay for the Otto Preminger film Bunny Lake is Missing , which also starred Olivier.[ citation needed ] Legal career[ edit ] Mortimer was called to the Bar ( Inner Temple ) in 1948, at the age of 25. His early career consisted of testamentary and divorce work, but on taking silk in 1966, he began to undertake work in criminal law. [5] His highest profile, though, came from cases relating to claims of obscenity , which, according to Mortimer, were "alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance." [4] He has sometimes been incorrectly cited as a member in the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial defence team, though this is inaccurate.

[12] Mortimer did however successfully represent publishers John Calder and Marion Boyars in their 1968 appeal against their conviction for publishing Hubert Selby, Jr. 's Last Exit to Brooklyn . [5] He assumed a similar role three years later, this time unsuccessfully, for Richard Handyside, the English publisher of The Little Red Schoolbook . [5] Mortimer was also defence counsel at the Oz conspiracy trial later in 1971. In 1976, he defended Gay News editor Denis Lemon ( Whitehouse v. Lemon ) for the publication of James Kirkup 's " The Love that Dares to Speak its Name " against charges of blasphemous libel ; Lemon was convicted with a suspended prison sentence, later overturned on appeal. [13] His defence of Virgin Records in the 1977 obscenity hearing for their use of the word bollocks in the title of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols , and the manager of the Nottingham branch of the Virgin record shop chain for the record's display in a window and its sale, led to the defendants being found not guilty.

Mortimer retired from the bar in 1984. [5] Later writing career[ edit ] Mortimer is best remembered for creating a barrister named Horace Rumpole , inspired by his father Clifford, [14] whose speciality is defending those accused of crime in London's Old Bailey . Mortimer created Rumpole for a BBC Play For Today in 1975. Although not Mortimer's first choice of actor (in an interview on the DVD set, he said he wanted Alistair Sim -- "but he was dead"), Leo McKern played the character with gusto and proved popular; accordingly, the idea was developed into a series, Rumpole of the Bailey for Thames Television , in which McKern again took the lead role. Mortimer also wrote a series of Rumpole books. In September–October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast four new 45-minute Rumpole plays by Mortimer with Timothy West in the title role. Mortimer also dramatised many of the real-life cases of the barrister Edward Marshall-Hall in a radio series featuring former Doctor Who star Tom Baker as the protagonist.

Mortimer was credited with writing the script for Granada Television 's 1981 serialization of Brideshead Revisited , based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh . However, Graham Lord's unofficial biography, John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate, [15] revealed in 2005 that none of Mortimer's submitted scripts had in fact been used and that the screenplay was actually written by the series' producer and director. Mortimer adapted John Fowles 's The Ebony Tower, starring Laurence Olivier for Granada in 1984. In 1986, his adaptation of his own novel Paradise Postponed was televised. He wrote the script, based on the autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli , for the 1999 film Tea with Mussolini , directed by Zeffirelli and starring Joan Plowright , Cher , Judi Dench , Maggie Smith and Lily Tomlin . From 2004, Mortimer worked as a consultant for the politico-legal US "dramedy" television show Boston Legal .

[16] He developed his career as a dramatist by rising early to write before attending court, and his work in total includes over fifty books, plays, and scripts. [17] Personal life[ edit ] Mortimer married Penelope Fletcher (he was her second husband), later better known as Penelope Mortimer , in 1949 and had a son Jeremy Mortimer and a daughter Sally Silverman . [18] The unstable marriage inspired work by both writers, of which Penelope's novel, The Pumpkin Eater (1962), later made into the film of the same name , is the best known. The couple divorced in 1971 and he married Penelope Gollop in 1972. They had two daughters, Emily Mortimer (1971), and Rosie Mortimer (1984). He lived with his second wife in the village of Turville Heath in Buckinghamshire . The split with his first wife had been bitter, but they were on friendly terms by the time of her death in 1999.

[7] In September 2004, Graham Lord discovered the existence of a second son, Ross Bentley, conceived during a secret affair Mortimer pursued with the English actress Wendy Craig more than 40 years earlier, [19] and born in November 1961. [6] Craig and Mortimer had met when the actress had been cast playing a pregnant woman in Mortimer's first full-length West End play, The Wrong Side of the Park . Ross Bentley was raised by Craig and her husband, Jack Bentley , the show business writer and musician. In Mortimer's memoirs, Clinging to the Wreckage, he wrote of "enjoying my mid-thirties and all the pleasures which come to a young writer."

Question: Which English barrister, who wrote the play "Voyage Around My Father" and the TV series "Rumpole of the Bailey", died in January 2009?
Answer: John Mortimer