Leonard Rossiter - Early Life and Stage Work

Early Life and Stage Work

Rossiter was born in Liverpool, the son of Elizabeth (née Howell) and John Rossiter. He lived over the barber shop which had been owned by his father. He was educated at Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School (1939–46) and it was his ambition to go to university to read modern languages and become a teacher. His father, a voluntary ambulanceman during the Second World War, was killed in an air raid in 1942. Rossiter had to support his mother, and so could not take up the place he had been offered at Liverpool University. He was a sergeant, initially in the Intelligence Corps, then in the Army Education Corps and spent much of his national service in Germany writing letters home for soldiers. After being demobbed he worked for six years as an insurance clerk in the claims and accident departments of Commercial Union Insurance Company. {{}}

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 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 turned professional as an actor at the comparatively late age of 27. He made his professional stage debut in Joseph Colton's The Gay Dog in Preston on 6 September 1954, and later became assistant stage manager. He 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 much other stage work: as Bertolt Brecht's Arturo Ui, The Strange Case of Martin Richter, Disabled, The Heretic, The Caretaker and Semi-Detached (in New York). His performance in the premiere of Michael Blakemore's stage production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 1969 met with critical acclaim: the part of the petty tyrant was perfectly suited to Rossiter.