{"id":11491,"date":"2022-02-23T14:02:02","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T13:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1590201"},"modified":"2022-02-23T14:28:11","modified_gmt":"2022-02-23T13:28:11","slug":"is-the-duke-based-on-a-true-story-kempton-buntons-grandson-explains","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/is-the-duke-based-on-a-true-story-kempton-buntons-grandson-explains\/","title":{"rendered":"Is The Duke based on a true story? Kempton Bunton\u2019s grandson explains"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Patrick Cremona\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Wednesday, 23 February 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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At first glance, the story told in new movie The Duke \u2013 which sees an elderly man steal a valuable painting of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London \u2013 might seem a little too far-fetched to be true.<\/p>\n

But believe it or not, the story is based on real events. Kempton Bunton (played here by Jim Broadbent) was indeed a real man, and he really was involved in an unlikely heist back in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

It was Chris Bunton, Kempton\u2019s grandson, who first pitched the idea of a film, having himself been told the story by his father when he was 14 years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was on an overnight ferry trip with my dad,\u201d Chris explains in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com<\/a>. \u201cAnd there\u2019s not much else to do on ferries but to sit in the bar. My dad likes his beer, so he\u2019d had a few beers and when he told me the story I thought he\u2019d had one too many, to be honest \u2013 it was like such an out-there, wacky story.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he didn\u2019t go into all of the details that we\u2019ve now researched, and that are behind the film. So I didn\u2019t understand the sheer magnitude of it then. The most entertaining thing to me at the time was learning [that the painting] was used in Dr No, so it wasn\u2019t until years later, really, that I got more heavily involved in the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read on for everything you need to know about the true story behind The Duke.<\/p>\n

The Duke true story<\/strong><\/h2>\n

According to Chris Bunton, one of the reasons he was so keen to pitch the idea in the first place was that he felt some of the information that was already out there wasn\u2019t entirely fair to his grandfather.<\/p>\n

Although the case wasn\u2019t that<\/em> widely known to the public, it started to gain some attention in 2011, when a couple of newspaper articles and a segment on The One Show covered the theft to mark the 50-year anniversary.<\/p>\n

It was then that Chris decided to do something about it. \u201cMy dad had given me all my granddad\u2019s writings, he\u2019d done a number of plays and I read his memoirs,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I felt that the information out there publicly, a lot of it was accurate, but a lot of it was kind of speculation. And I felt some of it was actually a little bit unfair to my grandfather. So I was motivated mainly by wanting to tell his full story, which I felt would do him more justice. And then I thought, well, he was an amateur writer, why don\u2019t I try and write a screenplay?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, Chris\u2019s pitch attracted a fair bit of interest from production companies, and his script was redrafted by screenwriters Richard Bean and Clive Coleman. And even though his initial screenplay was reworked fairly substantially, Chris is very pleased with the end result.<\/p>\n