Travelling North Film Festival awarded the Best Actor award to Leo McKern. "Travelling North" grossed $1,464,000 at the box office in Australia, which is equivalent to $2,942,640 in 2009 dollars. Travelling North Travelling North is a 1987 film directed by Carl Schultz and starring Leo McKern, Julia Blake, and Graham Kennedy. Based on an original 1979 play of the same name by David Williamson, it is one of Williamson's favourite movies based on his works. An aged couple decide to move from Melbourne to north Queensland. The David Williamson play "Travelling North" premiered in 1979, the year that Williamson moved from Melbourne
John Mortimer in 1975. Although not Mortimer's first choice of actor (in an interview on the DVD set, he said he wanted Alistair Sim -- "but he was dead"), 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