Leonard Rossiter - Film and Television Career

Film and Television 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. He established himself as a respected actor in theatre and film, and began to make his presence felt on television, with an intermittent role as Detective Inspector 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 episode "Dressed to Kill" (1963).

In 1968 he played Mr Sowerberry in the film version of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver! and he landed one of the few speaking supporting roles in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as the Russian scientist Smyslov. He worked with Kubrick again in Barry Lyndon seven years later. In the same year as 2001, he appeared in the prescient BBC TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics by Nigel Kneale.

In Rising Damp, on ITV, he played Rigsby, the lecherous landlord of a house converted into 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 acclaim. He was given a surprise tribute on This Is Your Life in 1975. In 1979 he appeared in the Galton and Simpson scripted short film Le Pétomane.

From 1979 and into the early 1980s he took roles in commercials, making an advert dressed as a traffic warden for Parker Pens, and notably starring with Joan Collins as her boorish companion in a series of successful and endearing Cinzano commercials. In these adverts the drink was always somehow spilt down Melissa (Joan Collins)'s cleavage. 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 that Rossiter used to refer jokingly to Collins as "The Prop".

In the animated adaptation of The Perishers he provided the voice for Boot the dog. He reprised Rigsby for a film version of Rising Damp in 1980 — so he had now played the role on stage, TV and film. His last TV role was as the supermarket manager in the eponymous Tripper's Day, an ITV sitcom. He continued to make a steady stream of cinema appearances, including a role in Lindsay Anderson's dark parable Britannia Hospital (1982).

He played the title role in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of The Life and Death of King John (1984). Rossiter's last film appearance was in Water (1985).