Leonard Rossiter

Leonard Rossiter (21 October 1926 – 5 October 1984) was an English actor.

Rossiter was born on 21 October 1926 in Wavertree, Liverpool, the second son of John and Elizabeth (née Howell) Rossiter.

The family lived over the barber's shop owned by his father.

He was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School (1939–46).

In September 1939, when the Second World War began, Rossiter was evacuated, along with his schoolmates, to Bangor in north Wales, where he stayed for 18 months.

While at school, his ambition was to go to university to read modern languages and become a teacher; however, his father, who served as a voluntary ambulanceman during the war, was killed in the May Blitz air raid in 1941.

Rossiter then had to support his mother, therefore he could not take up the place he had been offered at the University of Liverpool.

Instead, he completed his National Service as a sergeant, initially in the Intelligence Corps, then in the Army Education Corps, spending much of the time in Germany writing letters home for other soldiers.

After being demobbed he worked for six years as an insurance clerk in the claims and accident departments of the Commercial Union Insurance Company.

Rossiter started acting after his actress girlfriend challenged him to try it, after he had scoffed at the performances of the amateur group she was in.

He joined the Wavertree Community Centre Drama Group and made his first appearance with the Adastra Players in Terence Rattigan's Flare Path.

The local critic said that he "was particularly outstanding, his one fault being a tendency to speak too fast on one or two occasions".

He gave up his insurance job to enrol in Preston repertory theatre and became a professional actor at the age of 27.

He made his professional stage debut in Joseph Colton's The Gay Dog in Preston on 6 September 1954.

He later became assistant stage manager there, and then went on to Wolverhampton and Salisbury repertory companies.

In his first 19 months in the business he played some 75 roles.

He said later: "There was no time to discuss the finer points of interpretation. You studied the part, you did it and then you studied the next part. I developed a frightening capacity for learning lines. The plays became like Elastoplast, which you just stuck on and then tore off. It was the perfect preparation for rehearsing situation comedy on television at the rate of one episode a week."

In 1957–58, he played in the musical 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, from 1959 to 1961, a time he described as "the bedrock of his career", followed by other stage work, in, among other plays, The Strange Case of Martin Richter, Disabled, The Heretic, The Caretaker and Semi-Detached (in New York).

His first film role was in A Kind of Loving (1962).

In Billy Liar (1963) he played the title character's boss.

His first major television role was as Detective-Inspector Bamber in the long-running police television series Z-Cars.

He also had guest roles in series as diverse as The Avengers ("Dressed to Kill", 1963) and Steptoe and Son ("The Lead Man Cometh", 1964; "The Desperate Hours", 1972).

Among his early film credits were four films directed by Bryan Forbes, namely King Rat (1965), The Wrong Box (1966), The Whisperers (1967), and Deadfall (1968).

In 1968, he played Mr Sowerberry in the film version of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver! and took one of the few speaking supporting roles in 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Russian scientist Smyslov.

In 1968, he appeared in Nigel Kneale's television play The Year of the Sex Olympics, an episode of BBC 2's Theatre 625, one of his four appearances in the series.

In Rising Damp, on ITV, Rossiter played Rupert Rigsby, the lecherous landlord of a house converted into shabby bedsits, reprising the role from the successful stage version, The Banana Box.

While he was in Rising Damp he also took the lead role in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, adapted by David Nobbs from his own comic novels and broadcast on the BBC.

His performance in the premiere of Michael Blakemore's stage production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1969 met with critical acclaim.

Rossiter soon established himself as a character actor in films and television, as well as on stage.

He stated: "I think I sensed fairly early on that I was not physically or facially built in the way that would ever fit even remotely into heroic or what used to be called juvenile parts. I always played character parts - right from the start."

He had a long career in the theatre but achieved his highest profile for his television comedy roles starring as Rupert Rigsby in the ITV series Rising Damp from 1974 to 1978, and Reginald Perrin in the BBC's The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin from 1976 to 1979.

He worked with Stanley Kubrick again in Barry Lyndon (1975), in the role of Captain John Quin.

Rossiter was given a surprise tribute on This Is Your Life in 1975.

He appeared opposite Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) as Superintendent Quinlan.

After his portrayal of Reginald Perrin, Rossiter's non-comedy roles on television became less frequent, although there were exceptions, such as a debt collector in the one-off HTV thriller Machinegunner (1976), and Frank Harris in Fearless Frank, or Tit-bits from the Life of an Adventurer (1978), a BBC Play of the Week.

He appeared in I Tell You It's Burt Reynolds, an episode of the 1977 Yorkshire Television series The Galton & Simpson Playhouse, as well as the short films The Waterloo Bridge Handicap (1978), and the Galton and Simpson-scripted Le Pétomane (1979).

From 1978 to 1983, Rossiter performed in ten commercials for Cinzano.

The series of adverts was created by film director Alan Parker and, at Rossiter's suggestion, used an old music hall joke where he spills a drink over his wife, played by Joan Collins.

In the Channel 4 programme The 100 Greatest TV Ads (2000) Terry Lovelock, the director of two of the commercials, said that Rossiter used to refer jokingly to Collins as "The Prop".