The best Rumpole moment for me was the time he insisted on getting his kidney pudding from a restaurant where the owner refused to prepare it the way he wanted it. After Rumpole saved the owner/cook from losing his establishment, in an unrelated matter, the owner himself prepared the dish for him; the episode ends with Rumpole taking a bite from the pudding and reacting to a nasty flavor!
I will miss him too.
In the story, though, and in the audiotape reading, Rumpole is not so obviously displeased. “Oh, Hilda,” he says, “[it’s] not a patch on yours!”. Which might indicate disapproval, or just good politics.
I think it was a mashed spud, not kidney pud.
I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the obits that he won a big acting award for the STAGE version of A Man For All Seasons. I don’t remember if it was in London or Broadway - he played in both. But the odd thing is, he didn’t play Cromwell on the stage. He played a part that didn’t exist in the movie: The Common Man. He was essentially the one-man chorus playing the narrator, the servants, the jurors, the executioner, etc. I would have loved to have seen that.
“It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends – just don’t MAKE trouble – or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected.”
The powers that be decided (wisely) that the Common Man wouldn’t have worked in the movie, so they gave McKern the part of Cromwell.
Two more parts I haven’t seen mentioned: When I was in college I took a course on ancient Greece and they showed a film called The Drinking Party, which was Plato’s Symposium in modern dress. LM was Scorates.
And in the eighties he went back to Australia sto star ina flick called Travelling North.
I have a copy of his autobiography, by the way. Those of us who know him best as (John Mortimer’s) Rumpole might be astonished by how conservative he was.
Here is McKern on Rumpole:
"The man is nothing like me; I would have walked out of that awful thirties flat and left She Who Must Be Obeyed years ago. i would probably have succumbed to the temptation of abandoning principles and beliefs, faced with the prospect of a succession of tomorrows that promised nothing but repetitions of today. I do not have his wonderful acceptance of people being what they are, irrecoverable irresponsibles; I do not possess his balanced irony, his patience, his loyalty or his deeply-buried convctions and faIths which in the end will prove the apparent loser a winner in the only true sense of the word.
“The old defender will die in that wretched flat, or at his cramped desk in the overcrowded chambers, or climbing the steps up from the Holborn Underground station, and there will not be that many who appreciate what has gone, and very few who will know what words were engraved on his heart.”
RIP Leo. Thanks for many hours of pleasure.
Fifteen Iguana