Leo McKern AO 1920-2002

In real life, McKern was as conservative as Rumpole was liberal. ‘Rumpole and I are as different
as chalk and cheese,’ he said. He was also uncomfortable with the inevitable type casting: ‘I’m like a little doggie, struggling to its feet after having the branding iron put on me.’

Among McKern’s many film credits are Murder in the Cathedral (1952), Richard Lester’s The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film (1959), The Mouse That Roared (1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1962), the Beatles’ Help! (1965), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Ryan’s Daughter (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Gloucester in Laurence Olivier’s King Lear (1983). His radio play Chain of Events was filmed in 1957.

McKern also made a noteworthy contribution to Australian film. In 1987 he played the ageing Frank in Travelling North, a role that won him the AFI Best Actor Award. In 1995 he and Joan Sutherland played Dad and Mum Rudd in Dad and Dave: On Our Selection. He told the press: ‘I must say being away from the country for so long, and loving it so much, there may be a tendency to forget the accomplishments of people like Dad Rudd in building this place. I hope the film will open the eyes of a lot of people, especially the young kids who seem to know little or nothing about their country and the way it developed, the sort of people who made it. It seems to me that a lot of people, and the government especially, are determined to smother the whole story of our background and how it was made, how it developed. The old Anglo-Saxon foundation of Australia, if you can call it that, and the way it developed, is being denigrated and ignored to an enormous extent.’ McKern’s last screen role was Bishop Maigret in Paul Cox’s Molokai: The Story of Father Damien. It was released just a few days before his death.

In 1983 Leo McKern’s long, lustrous career was recognised when he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. He died in Bath on 23 July 2002, survived by his wife and his daughters – Abigail, who has a long list of stage, film and television credits, including the role of Liz Probert in Rumpole of the Bailey, and Harriet, who is a film-maker.

In spite of the years he spent overseas and his early struggles to soften his accent, Leo McKern remained robustly Australian, as British theatre director Tyrone Guthrie attested: ‘He can coo like a dove, roar like a lion, sing like an angel and curse like, well, as only Australians can.’

Frank Van Straten, 2007