The missing Rumpole

To become associated, even identified, with a role or a certain kind of role may ward off the financial uncertainties of an actor’s career, but it undoubtedly also brings its limitations. Remember how ineffably lady-like Greer Garson appeared in her MGM heyday: I recall watching her narrow her eyes in Mrs Miniver and thinking that she could play Lady Macbeth if someone gave her the chance. No one ever did. Leo McKern wasn’t quite so effectively imprisoned by his ‘Rumpole’ persona, but it is at least on the cards that he will be remembered with such tenacity for nothing else.

And that is a pity. Rumpole of the Bailey was certainly great television, wittily and humanely written (by John Mortimer), and acted with a real sense of character by all concerned. But it is McKern who stays ineradicably in the mind: stocky, rotund of shape, orotund of phrase, his compassion stirred by assorted delinquents, stoking up with Pommeroy’s claret at ‘El Vino’, joining battle with irascible judges by day and a majestic wife (Peggy Thorpe-Bates in full sail) at home. It is not just nostalgia that makes me think there is nothing like it or him on today’s small screens. However, there was more to McKern’s career than Rumpole, as George Whaley’s biography makes clear.