The Duke

The Duke is a 2020 British comedy film directed by Roger Michell, with a screenplay by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. Dealing with the 1961 theft of the Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, the film stars Jim Broadbent, Helen Mirren, Fionn Whitehead, Anna Maxwell Martin and Matthew Goode. It was Michell's penultimate film before his death on 22 September 2021. The film was awarded 5 stars from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It was released in cinemas in the UK on 25 February 2022. Plot Sixty-year-old self-educated working-class Kempton Bunton appears in Court Number 1 at the Old Bailey, pleading not guilty to charges of stealing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington and its frame from the National Gallery in London. Six months earlier, in spring 1961, he had sent a script to the BBC from his native Newcastle upon Tyne. Soon afterwards he is jailed at Durham for 13 days for watching TV without a licence. Although he can afford one, he refuses to do so as he is campaigning against pensioners having to pay it, part of his wider strong beliefs about supporting the common man. Kempton's son Jackie meets him on his release and on their way home they visit the grave of Marion, Jackie's sister, who had been killed in a bicycle accident aged only 18. Kempton's wife Dorothy works as a housekeeper and babysitter for a local councillor and his wife; Jackie aims to become a boat-builder and move away; and his elder brother Kenny lives in Leeds, working in construction but involved in low-level crime. Kempton himself is sacked from his job as a taxi driver due to being over-talkative to passengers and giving a free ride to an impoverished disabled World War One veteran. He gets Dorothy to allow him a two-day trip to London to drum up press and parliamentary attention for his campaign and BBC interest in his scripts, on condition that if he does not get that attention he will give up writing and campaigning and get a job. An unseen man with a north-east English accent steals the painting and after Kempton's return to Newcastle he and Jackie make a false back to a wardrobe to hide it.