Sir John Clifford Mortimer CBE QC FRSL was an English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter, and author. Mortimer was a prolific writer for the theatre, films (starting during World War II, when he wrote scripts for the Crown Film Unit), television and radio. He also wrote fiction and was a trial attorney for more than 30 years.
The documentary uses Graham Greene's own words from his books and recordings, as well as photographs and clips from his many films, to reveal the fascinating life of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
Release Date:2013-01-01
Character:Self
Vote Count:1
A look at the history of British B-movies.
Release Date:2008-06-21
Character:Himself (as Sir John Mortimer)
Vote Count:1
Release Date:2006-08-14
Episode Count:1
Adapted from the work of Miguel de Cervantes, this is the story of a hidalgo, fanatic for chivalry novels, who loses his sanity and believing to be a knight named Don Quixote de La Mancha, decides to go on imaginary adventures along with his friend, the simple farmer Sancho Panza, who becomes his squire. On their journeys, they rescue dames in distress in honorable acts and fight giants among other perils, with Don longing to be with the love of his life, lady Dulcinea, and Sancho waiting to be rewarded with an island where he's about to become a governor.
Release Date:2000-04-09
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:31
In 1930s fascist Italy, adolescent Luca just lost his mother. His father, a callous businessman, sends him to be taken care of by British expatriate Mary Wallace. Mary and her cultured friends - including artist Arabella, young widow Elsa, and archaeologist Georgie - keep a watchful eye over the boy. But the women's cultivated lives take a dramatic turn when Allied forces declare war on Mussolini.
Release Date:1999-03-25
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Vote Count:145
Made by Carlton Television for ITV (UK) , this adaptation of Laurie Lee's autobiographical novel follows a young man's maturation in the country town of Gloucestershire near the end of World War I. As young Laurie (Dashiell Reece) comes of age under the protective eye of his mother (Juliet Stevenson), he learns to live with an eccentric collection of friends, neighbours, and relatives. As he enters his teenage years, Laurie (now played by Joe Roberts) discovers women, specifically Rosie Burdock (Lia Barrow). Veteran screenwriter John Mortimer adapted Lee's book, with Lee narrating.
Release Date:1998-12-26
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:7
Release Date:1998-07-11
Episode Count:1
Leslie Titmuss returns to Rapstone village and will do whatever it takes to fit in with the highest levels of society. Married to his second wife, Jenny, he seeks to buy his first wife's country house. These plans are hampered by a real estate development that Leslie, due to his free market politics, can hardly oppose publicly.
Release Date:1991-09-03
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:3
Molly Pargeter is a forty-something wife and mother of three girls, who leads a stable but dull life in 1980s West London. She feels overweight and there is no passion in her relationship with her husband Hugh, who is secretly seeing another woman. For most of her life she has found escape in detective novels and books on art, especially about the fifteenth century Italian fresco painter Piero Della Francesca. Then in a newspaper's small ads Molly sees the details of a villa in Tuscany, Italy to let and after travelling to Italy to view the villa "La Felicita" she decides to take it for the family's August holiday.
Release Date:1989-11-01
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Episode Count:4
Vote Count:6
This documentary series uses drama and commentary to shed light on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Luigi Pirandello, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.
Release Date:1988-01-10
Character:Self
Episode Count:1
Film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's debut novel, 'Mary'.
Release Date:1987-03-05
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
A clergyman noted for his support of left-wing causes, leaves his considerable estate to a Conservative member of parliament. Adaptation of the novel by John Mortimer.
Release Date:1986-06-15
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:1
A successful lawyer struck with blindness in middle age continues his battles in the courtroom with the assistance of his family. As his son deals with bitter memories of their relationship, he also seeks his father's respect and love and in the process learns to love in return.
Release Date:1984-04-19
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:5
Touching comedy about a high court judge, now retired to his English countryside home, who resolves to end years of suspicion about his wife's fidelity and the true paternity of their son.
Release Date:1984-01-01
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:1
Charles Ryder, an agnostic man, becomes involved with members of the Flytes, a Catholic family of aristocrats, over the course of several years between the two world wars.
Release Date:1981-10-12
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:11
Vote Count:67
Period Drama. The true story of Unity Mitford who in the 1930's went to live in Germany and was friends with Adolf Hitler.
Release Date:1981-03-20
Department:Crew
Job:Script
A bored Rumpole, living in Florida retirement, uses an inquiry from Phyllida as a pretext to re-establish himself back in chambers.
Release Date:1980-12-30
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:10
This topical debate series based on Any Questions? typically features politicians from at least the three major political parties as well as other public figures who answer pre-selected questions put to them by a carefully selected audience.
Release Date:1979-09-25
Character:Self - Panellist
Episode Count:1
Vote Count:12
Biography of William Shakespeare.
Release Date:1978-06-13
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:6
Will Shakespeare, also known as Life of Shakespeare and William Shakespeare: His Life & Times, was a 1978 historical drama series created and written by John Mortimer. Broadcast in six parts, the series is a dramatisation of the life and times of the great poet William Shakespeare played by Tim Curry, and was co-produced by Lew Grade's ATV and RAI and distributed internationally by ITC. The two production companies had collaborated successfully before on Jesus of Nazareth the previous year.
Release Date:1978-06-13
Department:Creator
Job:Creator
Vote Count:1
Rumpole of the Bailey is a British television series created and written by the British writer and barrister John Mortimer. It stars Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients, and has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.
Release Date:1975-12-17
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:41
Vote Count:17
An irreverent barrister chooses to defend a young Jamaican boy accused of stabbing on the same day his only son leaves for college in America.
Release Date:1975-12-16
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:1
Shades of Greene is a British television series based on short stories written by the author Graham Greene. The series began in 1975, with each hour-long episode featuring a dramatisation of one of Greene's stories, many of which dealt with issues such as guilt and the Catholic faith, as well as looking at life in general. Actors to have appeared in the series include John Gielgud, Leo McKern, Virginia McKenna, Paul Scofield, and Roy Kinnear. The series began on 9 September 1975 and ran for two seasons.
Release Date:1975-09-09
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:1
Vote Count:1
John Mortimer's play about the tangled love life of an East London pub landlord.
Release Date:1972-06-19
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted. The individual episodes were between fifty and a hundred minutes in duration.
Release Date:1970-10-15
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:1
Vote Count:8
John and Mary meet in a singles bar, sleep together, and spend the next day getting to know each other.
Release Date:1969-12-14
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Vote Count:33
Suspecting that her husband might be having an affair, a wife plots to catch him in the act.
Release Date:1968-11-27
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:5
Release Date:1966-01-17
Department:Writing
Job:Original Story
A woman reports that her young daughter is missing, but there seems to be no evidence that she ever existed.
Release Date:1965-10-03
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Vote Count:187
An Englishman with a grudge against an insurance company for a disallowed claim fakes his own death and escapes to Spain, but is soon pursued by an insurance investigator.
Release Date:1963-10-01
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Vote Count:42
After nearly 40 years of waiting for his big chance, Wilfred Morgenhall is given the case of defending Herbert Fowle who is accused of murdering his wife. Despite Fowle's insistence of guilt, Moregenhall will not let go of the opportunity to plead his client as innocent and be a star in the courtroom.
Release Date:1962-09-25
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Vote Count:12
Committed pacifist Tom Jordan's decision to help former President Rivera escape a military coup is a simple act of mercy that takes him and his wife to the edge of despair. It turns them into outlaws and fugitives, hunted by a vicious South American regime; yet it could also bring them together in a way they have never been before.
Release Date:1962-07-19
Department:Writing
Job:Screenplay
Vote Count:11
A young female designer is on the brink of an affair with a married male executive at the company where she works. The film tells the story of their illicit lunch hour rendezvous.
Release Date:1962-01-01
Department:Production
Job:Producer
Vote Count:8
A young governess for two children becomes convinced that the house and grounds are haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.
Release Date:1961-12-15
Department:Crew
Job:Additional Writing
Vote Count:598
A young salesman from Trinidad tries to sell a complete set of encyclopedia to Sally Louth, a housewife living on the Chelsea-Fulham border in London.
Release Date:1961-04-11
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Helen Lester is in love with a man she has known just 24 hours, a playboy who spent time in jail for passing bad checks. Though the man has promised to change, most of her strait-laced relatives are up in arms. But Clare Lester, Helen's grandmother, says the girl is free to join the man she loves. On one condition, that she listen to the story of a day in Clare's own life and of a man she tried to change.
Release Date:1961-03-20
Department:Writing
Job:Teleplay
These dueling one-act comedies highlight the work of playwright John Mortimer. In "The Dock Brief," an ill-prepared attorney is put to the test when his client confesses to killing his wife. In "What Shall We Tell Caroline?" a father with good intentions tries to protect his wife and daughter from the bad things in life.
Release Date:1959-11-02
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Mark Conrad, a habitual drunk and troublemaker with a shady past, is expelled by Hong Kong police after one too many bar fights. He's sent to Macao on the Fa Tsan, a ferry owned by Captain Hart. Conrad's papers are out of order and Macao refuses him entry. Unable to go ashore, Conrad is a permanent passenger on the ferry with Hart, who detests him. It's all one long, lazy voyage for Conrad until one fateful trip when an encounter with a typhoon and pirates forces Conrad to choose between an aimless drifter's life and becoming a man again.
Release Date:1959-10-29
Department:Writing
Job:Dialogue
Vote Count:13
German adaptation of The Dock Brief
Release Date:1958-07-24
Department:Writing
Job:Original Story
This hilarious one-act play by John Mortimer (creator of Rumpole of the Bailey) is the story of a highly incompetent lawyer preparing to defend a man who, by his own admission, is guilty of murdering his wife. Starring Sir Michael Hordern (Gandhi, How I Won the War), two-time Tony winner George Rose (My Fair Lady), and Leueen MacGrath (who with George S. Kaufman co-wrote Silk Stockings).
Release Date:1957-09-16
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Hallmark Hall of Fame is an anthology program on American television, sponsored by Hallmark Cards, a Kansas City based greeting card company. The longest-running primetime series in the history of television, it has a historically long run, beginning during 1951 and continuing into 2013. From 1954 onward, all of its productions have been shown in color, although color television video productions were extremely rare in 1954. Many television movies have been shown on the program since its debut, though the program began with live telecasts of dramas and then changed to videotaped productions before finally changing to filmed ones. The series has received eighty Emmy Awards, twenty-four Christopher Awards, eleven Peabody Awards, nine Golden Globes, and four Humanitas Prizes. Once a common practice in American television, it is the last remaining television program such that the title includes the name of the sponsor. Unlike other long-running TV series still on the air, it differs in that it broadcasts only occasionally and not on a weekly broadcast programming schedule.
Release Date:1951-12-24
Department:Writing
Job:Writer
Episode Count:1
Vote Count:6
An aristocrat won't economize, then his rich brother in law is found murdered in the grounds of the aristocrat's house
Release Date:1938-12-02
Character:Youth (uncredited)
Vote Count:3
A woman disguises herself in men's clothes in order to follow her husband to the wars.
Release Date:1935-07-22
Character:Minor Role
Vote Count:2
Forever England gives John Mills his first leading role as Brown. Born after a brief affair between his mother and a naval officer, he joins the Royal Navy during the First World War. There his bravery and marksmanship keeps a German ship in port so a British ship can sink it. He becomes a hero, but at what cost?
Release Date:1935-05-15
Vote Count:6