Leo McKern AO 1920-2002

In 1956 the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust decided to stage Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly
for the Melbourne Olympics. McKern was chosen to play Ned, and he and a number of other expatriates were brought back especially. It was a fiasco. The Sydney season was disappointing and the Melbourne establishment decreed that the glorification of a bushranger was not appropriate Games fare. The proposed season at Her Majesty’s was abandoned. To make amends, the Trust backed a production of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, which McKern directed and played in. He was also seen in an ABC radio production of The Clandestine Marriage.

In London in 1959 McKern directed the British premiere of The Shifting Heart, Richard Beynon’s drama of bigotry against ‘New Australians’. Two years later he made his New York debut as Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, which achieved a marathon 637-performance run.

He was back in Australia in 1971, playing for the Melbourne Theatre Company as the irascible Governor Bligh in Ray Lawler’s The Man Who Shot the Albatross, and the self-opinionated Rollo in Marcel Achard’s Patate. Both plays were repackaged for the 1972 Adelaide Festival. McKern’s greatest stage success in Australia came in 1988-1991 when he toured in Patrick Edgeworth’s Boswell for the Defence.

The last of McKern’s many West End credits was the Chichester Festival Theatre production of Harold Brighouse’s Hobson’s Choice at the Lyric Theatre in 1995. He returned to Australia in 1999 to play Mr Hardcastle in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer for the Sydney Theatre Company at the Opera House Drama Theatre. The cast included Ruth Cracknell and McKern’s daughter, Abigail, with whom he had never previously acted on stage.

All through his career McKern was as at home on film and television as he was on stage. His principal television credits include The Prisoner (1967), Reilly – Ace of Spies (1983) and, of course, the wily, overweight, jaded-but-dedicated defence lawyer Horace Rumpole in 42 episodes of John Mortimer’s Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-1992). ‘I suppose old Rumpers is a universal sort of character,’ McKern said of the characterisation for which he is best known and most affectionately remembered. ‘It’s rather nice that the oldies, the crumblies, the wrinklies – and I’m one of them – have a hero who isn’t young.’ As QC Geoffrey Robertson, put it: ‘His great achievement was to create a lawyer the world could love.’