John Mortimer - Later Writing Career

Later Writing Career

Mortimer is best remembered for creating a barrister named Horace Rumpole, whose speciality is defending those accused of crime in London's Old Bailey. Mortimer created Rumpole for a BBC Play For Today in 1975. Although not Mortimer's first choice of actor, Leo McKern played the character with gusto and proved popular; accordingly, the idea was developed into a series Rumpole of the Bailey' for Thames Television, in which McKern again took the lead role. Mortimer also wrote a series of Rumpole books. In September–October 2003, BBC Radio 4 broadcast four new 45-minute Rumpole plays by Mortimer with Timothy West in the title role. Mortimer also dramatised many of the real-life cases of the barrister Edward Marshall-Hall in a radio series featuring former Doctor Who star Tom Baker as the protagonist.

Mortimer was credited with writing the script for Granada Television's 1981 serialization of Brideshead Revisited, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. However, Graham Lord's unofficial biography, John Mortimer: The Devil's Advocate, revealed in 2005 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's The Ebony Tower, starring Laurence Olivier for Granada in 1984.

In 1986, his adaptation of his own novel Paradise Postponed was televised. This depicts what he saw as Britain's descent into viciousness in the era of Thatcherism.

Mortimer 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. From 2004, Mortimer worked as a consultant for the politico-legal US "dramedy" television show Boston Legal.

He developed his career as a dramatist by rising early to write before attending court, and his work in total includes over fifty books, plays, and scripts.