The Duke is a 2020 British comedy drama film directed by Roger Michell, with a screenplay by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. It is based on the true story of the 1961 theft of the Portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Kempton Bunton. 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 released in cinemas in the UK on 25 February 2022 to generally good reviews.
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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, Kempton 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 Kempton 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.
