A stout Australian with a baritone built for argument, Leo McKern spent decades playing blusterers, schemers and irascible men with a joke in them, and made one of them, Horace Rumpole, so much his own that the rest of his work has had to shout to be heard.
Fi1m perspective
Leo McKern was short and stout and had a voice that could fill a courtroom or a cathedral, and directors used him accordingly. For fifty years he was the man at the edge of the frame who talked too much and enjoyed it: blusterers, schemers, irascible old men with a joke somewhere in them. He never tried to hide the build or soften the voice. He argued, and the argument was the performance.
He came up on the stage, first in Australia in 1944 and then in Britain from 1946, at the Old Vic and later with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at Stratford, where he did the big classical parts: Iago, Volpone, Peer Gynt. The film part that mattered came in his forties. Fred Zinnemann cast him as Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons (1966); David Lean gave him Thomas Ryan in Ryan's Daughter (1970); Karel Reisz used him in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). On television he turned up in The Prisoner (1967), in three episodes, as Number Two, one of the interrogators of Number Six.
Then came Rumpole. John Mortimer wrote Rumpole of the Bailey and McKern played the barrister for ITV from 1978 to 1992, forty-four episodes, and Mortimer credited him with bringing the man fully to life. We have watched him as Rumpole more often than we have watched most things, and the pleasure has not worn: the grumbling, the digressions, the sudden sharpness under the bluster, all carried on a voice that seems to taste each sentence before it lets it go.
The Cromwell is the performance the cinema remembers, and it shows what he could and could not be given. Robert Bolt wrote Cromwell as a villain, in black, with a sneer, and gave Thomas More every good line. McKern plays what is on the page, with intelligence and a good deal of relish, and we watched him wishing someone had let him have the other half of the argument, because he was plainly clever enough to win it. That is the recurring frustration with McKern on film: the parts were smaller than the actor.
He knew it, and he minded, and he said so. "I consider my best performance ever was as Peer Gynt, though if I get an obituary, they will say, of course, 'known to millions as Rumpole'." They did. Watch A Man for All Seasons for the sneer done properly, and then an evening of Rumpole for everything Bolt did not have room for.
Biography
Leo McKern (16 March 1920 – 23 July 2002) was an Australian-born actor who appeared in numerous British, Australian and American films and television programmes, as well as more than 200 stage roles.
Born Reginald McKern in Sydney, he moved to England in 1946 and became established in the theatre, performing with the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His screen credits include Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons (1966), roles in Help! (1965), Ryan's Daughter (1970), The Omen (1976) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and Carl Bugenhagen in Damien: Omen II (1978). He played Former Number Two in the 1967 television series The Prisoner.
McKern is best known for portraying Horace Rumpole in the long-running series Rumpole of the Bailey (1978–1992). He received the Order of Australia and won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Actor for Travelling North (1986).
