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.
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.
He published his first novel in 1947 and produced a stream of plays and radio dramas from the 1950s. 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.
But his most popular creation 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.”
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