John Mortimer

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This article is about the writer. For the leader of the Kent rebellion, see Jack Cade.

Biography of Mortimer published in 2005

Sir John Clifford Mortimer CBE QC (born 21 April 1923) is an English barrister turned prolific writer and dramatist.

Educated at Harrow School and Brasenose College, Oxford, his oeuvre includes over fifty books, plays, and scripts. The play, A Voyage Round My Father (1971) is autobiographical, recounting his experiences as a young barrister and his relationship with his blind father. He developed his career as a playwright by rising early to write before attending court.

Mortimer's most famous creation is a barrister named Horace Rumpole, whose speciality is defending those accused of crime in London's redoubtable hall of justice, the Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for "Rumpole of the Bailey", a 1975 contribution to the BBCs Play For Today anthology series. Played with gusto by Leo McKern, the character proved popular, and was developed into a Rumpole of the Bailey television series for Thames Television and a series of books (all written by Mortimer). In September – October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast four new 45-minute Rumpole dramatizations by Mortimer starring Timothy West in the title role. He also dramatised many of the real-life cases of the barrister Edward Marshall-Hall in a radio series starring ex-Doctor Who star Tom Baker.

Mortimer was credited with the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited for Granada Television in 1981. However it emerged in 2005 in a published biography of Mortimer "The Devil's Advocate" 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' The Ebony Tower for Granada in 1984. He also 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.

John Mortimer was married to Penelope Fletcher, later better known as Penelope Mortimer, in 1949 and had a son and a daughter by her. They divorced in 1971 and he married Penelope Gollop in 1972. They have two daughters. He has five children altogether, Sally Silverman, Jeremy Mortimer, Ross Bentley, Emily Mortimer and Rosie Mortimer and lives with his second wife, Penny Mortimer, in a village north of Henley-on-Thames in Buckinghamshire.

In August 2004, he learned that he had an additional child he had not known about when he met his son Ross Bentley, more than 40 years after a formerly secret affair with Wendy Craig. The son had been brought up 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."

[edit] Bibliography

Charade (1947)
Like Men Betrayed (1953)
The Narrowing Stream (1954)
Heaven and Hell (including The Fear of Heaven and The Prince of Darkness) (1976)
Rumpole of the Bailey (1978) ISBN 0-14-004670-4
The Trials of Rumpole (1979)
Rumpole (1980)
Regina v Rumpole (1981)
Rumpole for the Defence (1982)
Rumpole's Return (1982)
Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) ISBN 0-14-006860-0
The First Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1983)
Rumpole And the Golden Thread (1983)
Edwin and Other Plays (1984)
In Character (1984) ISBN 0-14-006389-7
Paradise Postponed (1985)
Rumpole for the Prosecution (1986)
Rumpole's Last Case (1987)
The Second Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1987)
Rumpole And the Age of Miracles (1988)
Summer's Lease (1988) ISBN 0-14-010573-5
Rumpole And the Age for Retirement (1989)
Rumpole a La Carte (1990)
Titmuss Regained (1990)
Great Law And Order Stories (1990)
The Rapstone Chronicles (omnibus) (1991)
Rumpole On Trial (1992)
Dunster (1992) ISBN 0-670-84060-2
Thou Shalt Not Kill: Father Brown, Father Dowling And Other Ecclesiastical Sleuths (1992) (with G K Chesterton, Ralph McInerny)
The Oxford Book of Villains (1992)
The Best of Rumpole: A Personal Choice (1993)
Under the Hammer (1994)
Murderers And Other Friends: Another Part of Life (1994)
Rumpole And the Angel of Death (1995)
Rumpole And the Younger Generation (1995)
Felix in the Underworld (1996)
The Third Rumpole Omnibus (omnibus) (1997)
The Sound of Trumpets (1998)
The Mammoth Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories (1998)
The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully (2000)
Rumpole Rests His Case (2001)
Rumpole And the Primrose Path (2002)
Where There's a Will (2003)
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2004)
Quite Honestly (2005) ISBN 0-670-03483-5
The Scales of Justice (2005)
Zerah Colburn the Spirit of Darkness (2005)
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006)