Leonard Rossiter (21 October
1926 – 5 October 1984) was an English
actor with careers in film, television and
theatre. He is best known for his roles as Rupert
Rigsby, in the British
comedy
television series Rising Damp,
and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of
Reginald Perrin (1976-79), as well as for a series of
Cinzano commercials (1978-1983), with
Joan Collins.
Early life and stage work
Leonard
Rossiter was born in Liverpool
, where he lived over the barber shop which had been
owned by his father. He was educated at Liverpool Collegiate
Grammar School and it had been his ambition to go to university to
read modern languages and become a teacher.
Tragically his father,
a voluntary ambulanceman during the Second World War, had been killed in an
air-raid in 1942 and so, having
his mother to support, he was unable to afford to take up the place
he had been offered by Liverpool University
. Finishing grammar school aged 18, as the
war in Europe came to an end, he was conscripted into the
Army Education Corps and served in
Germany, helping soldiers to read and reply to letters from home.
Having been
demobbed he worked as an
insurance clerk in the claims and accidents department of the
Commercial Union Insurance Company for six years. He began acting
when he picked up a girlfriend from her
amateur dramatics class and was challenged
to do better when he criticised her and her fellow performers. He
gave up his job in
insurance to enrol in
Preston
repertory theatre and turned
professional as an actor at the comparatively late age of 27.
He made
his stage debut in The Gay Dog in Preston
, Lancashire
, later becoming assistant stage manager. He
went on to Wolverhampton and Salisbury. 1957-58 he played in
Free As Air and then toured in
Eugene O'Neill's
The Iceman Cometh.
He joined the Bristol Old Vic
and was there for two years, followed by other
stage work: as Brecht's Arturo Ui, The
Strange Case of Martin Richter, Disabled, The
Heretic, The Caretaker
and Semi-Detached (in New York).
Film career
He broke into film roles with
Billy Liar in which he plays the
title character's boss. This brief role fixed him with audiences as
an often flawed and inflexible authority figure - apparently
similar to his real-life personality. Through the 1950s and 1960s
he established himself as a respected actor in theatre and film,
and began to make his presence felt on television, with a
semi-regular role as Det-Insp Bamber in the police series
Z Cars, as well as guest roles in
series as diverse as
Steptoe and
Son ('The Lead man Cometh', 1964, 'The Desperate Hours',
1972) and
The
Avengers ('Dressed to Kill', 1963).
In 1968 he played the
supporting role of undertaker Mr
Sowerberry in the film version of Lionel
Bart's musical Oliver!
and further came to wider public notice when he landed one of the
few speaking supporting roles in Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey as the Russian
scientist
Smyslov (he was to work with Kubrick again, in Barry Lyndon seven years later).
Continuing the
science fiction
theme, in the same year as
2001, he appeared in the
prescient BBC TV play
The Year of the Sex
Olympics by
Quatermass creator
Nigel Kneale.
In 1969 he premiered in the UK in the title role of
Brecht's
The Resistible Rise of Arturo
Ui. The part of the petty tyrant was perfectly suited to
Rossiter and garnered critical and public acclaim. He returned to
the
BBC sitcom
Steptoe and Son for the
1972 episode 'The Desperate Hours' as an escaped convict, before
winning his two leading roles in sitcoms which made him a household
name.
In
Rising Damp, on
ITV, he played Rigsby, the lecherous
landlord of a house converted to a block of seedy
bedsits, reprising the role from its successful stage version,
entitled
The Banana Box. While on
Rising Damp, he
also took the eponymous lead in
The Fall and Rise of
Reginald Perrin, adapted by
David
Nobbs from his own
Reginald
Perrin comic novels and aired on the BBC. His performances
as Rigsby and Perrin earned him enormous critical acclaim,
including from his co-stars. During this period, he was given a
surprise tribute on
This Is Your
Life in 1975.
At the same time he starred alongside
Joan
Collins as her bumbling suitor in a series of successful and
endearing
Cinzano commercials, in which
somehow the drink would always be spilled down the female
character's dress. In the 2000
Channel 4
programme
The 100 Greatest
TV Ads, Terry Lovelock, the director of several of these
commercials, revealed that he found Rossiter difficult to work
with, and had referred to Collins as "The Prop".
In 1976 he starred in an
HTV TV thriller with
comedic elements -
Machinegunner, in which he played a
private detective (given the eponymous nickname because of his
relentless knocking) drawn into a conspiracy after accepting an
apparently straightforward divorce investigation.
In the animated adaptation of
The
Perishers he provided the voice for
Boot the dog. He reprised Rigsby for a
movie version of
Rising Damp in 1980 — meaning he had now
played the role on stage, TV and film — and his last TV role was
that of the eponymous
supermarket
manager in
Tripper's Day, an
ITV sitcom which was not up to the standards of
the shows he had previously adorned, though the audience liked it.
Bruce Forsyth took over the role after
Rossiter died.
He continued to make a steady stream of cinema appearances,
including a role in
Lindsay
Anderson's dark parable
Britannia Hospital (1982).
Rossiter displayed his acid wit in two books:
The Devil's
Bedside Book in 1980, a collection of cynical dictionary
definitions in the style of
Ambrose
Bierce's
Devil's
Dictionary, and
The Lowest Form of Wit in 1981, a
collection of biting
bon mots, stinging
retorts, and insults divided into six main sections, illustrated
with cartoons and including a definitive guide and a history of
sarcasm.
He played
the title roles in the BBC Shakespeare
production of King
John (1984) and also in the short film Le Pétomane (1979), the stage name of
Josef Pujols who, due to an unusual accident he suffered in youth,
was able to take in and expel an almost limitless amount of gas
through his anus, an ability he exploited to become for several
years the main attraction at the Moulin Rouge
. Rossiter's last film appearance was in
Water (1985).
Death
Rossiter
died from hypertrophic
cardiomyopathy in 1984 while waiting to go onstage at the
Lyric Theatre, London
, where he
was performing in Joe Orton's play
Loot. His funeral took
place at St. Mary's Church, The Boltons, SW10 a few days later. He
left behind his second wife Gillian Raine, the actress, and a
daughter Camilla. His affair with broadcaster
Sue MacGregor was not revealed until long
afterwards. Raine was unaware of the affair, but described the
marriage as "up and down". She received a letter from MacGregor
breaking the news that her memoirs which were about to be published
would include an account of the affair. He had previously been
married to actress
Josephine
Tewson, a cousin of actor
John
Inman.
He had met Raine when he played the lead role of Fred Midway in a
new play called
Semi-Detached, directed by Tony
Richardson. She was his co-star, playing Hilda Midway.
The play opened on
Friday 8 June 1962 at the Belgrade Theatre
in Coventry
and ran for a week. At this time Leonard was
married to Josephine Tewson, an actress he had worked with many
times in Rep in the 1950s, but their marriage was about to break
up. During the play's second run at the Belgrade, in September
1963, Leonard and Gillian Raine fell in love and started to live
together, although they did not marry until 1972.
Rossiter's death came as a surprise as he was very fit — he played
squash,
football and
tennis
regularly — and had been given an 'all clear' by his doctor prior
to accepting the role in
Loot.
Selected filmography
References
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