The death of Rumpole

Actor Leo McKern, best known for his TV series role as Rumpole of the Bailey, died today. He was 82.

Australian-born McKern had been ill for some time and died at a nursing home near his home in Bath, his agent said.

He became a household name playing the pugnacious barrister Rumpole and also enjoyed a distinguished stage career.

McKern was known to fans around the world for his TV role as the curmudgeonly Horace Rumpole of the Central Criminal Court from 1977. The series, written by John Mortimer, was a hit for 15 years. And though that was the part of his career for which he will be best remembered, he started acting after leaving Australia for England in 1946.

On arrival in London, he spent three years with the Old Vic and two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

McKern - who had a glass eye after an accident as a teenager - starred in more than 200 stage productions during his five-decade career. After several comic-villain film assignments, McKern briefly became an icon of the Swinging 60s with his portrayal of the blustering cult leader in the Beatles' Help in 1965.

He then played Cromwell in A Man For All Seasons in 1966, as Professor Moriarty in Gene Wilder's The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother in 1986, and as a pigheaded ex-communist civil engineer in Travelling North in 1986, a role which won him several awards.

In the late 1970s, McKern scored an enormous hit as Rumpole, a role that was both a curse and a blessing to McKern, as he revealed to Vanity Fair magazine in 1995: "I consider that my best performance ever was as Peer Gynt. But if get an obit in the London Times, they will say, 'of course, known to millions as Rumpole'.''

Among other achievements, McKern was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1983.

He leaves his wife of 56 years, Jane Holland.

Born in Sydney, the youngest of three brothers, he left school at 15, he recalled, "so I could get a job and help support the family during the Depression years". He worked as an apprentice engineer in a fridge factory, where he was struck by piece of flying steel in the eye.

"All I remember was being very startled - I don't remember it being painful. The pain came with all the things they did afterwards."

McKern always revelled in the injury - he was known to tap his false eye during rehearsals and even discretely remove it in restaurants, bury it in his food and complain to mortified waiting staff.

However it was as an army clerk in Sydney that McKern first began to act. The job bored him so much he joined the army's evening acting group and began to develop his skills - skills showed their worth after his honeymoon with first wife Lindsey, an artist he had met at college. Instead of taking the regulation 10 days army marriage leave, the couple took 20 days off and McKern hauled before his superiors.

"I told the commanding officer that Lindsey had run off with an American servicemen. Rubbish, of course, but I cried real tears and so did he.

"I got a £25 fine instead of being put away. I think I decided then to become a full-time actor."

After only a short time McKern's first marriage ended, and the budding actor followed Jane Holland, a Sydney actress with whom he had become besotted and who would become his second wife, to London.

He met Jane at a party. "I saw her across a crowded room and it was love at first sight. I was utterly bowled over because she was so very beautiful with a marvellous figure."

McKern later carved out a successful theatre career which included roles with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the Old Vic.

"Olivier once said a very kind thing about my Uncle Vanya. He said it was definitive. And Peter Hall said it too - although I don't think Peter would have said it if he'd known Olivier said it first."