Leonard Rossiter’s manic physicality was a revelation | Michael Billington

His gangster Hitler in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui turned him into a star but from his earliest roles the actor had an unforgettable expressive force

• Rossiter interviewed by the Guardian in 1969
• ‘It was hard not to stare at him all the time’: inside the remarkable rise and shocking loss of Leonard Rossiter

I first saw Leonard Rossiter as Fred Midway in David Turner’s play Semi-Detached at the Belgrade, Coventry in 1963 and it was a revelation. Olivier had played the same role in London with a low-key realism. Rossiter, who like the character had worked in insurance, presented us with a manic Midlands Machiavel. The stiff-jointed legs shot out like pistons, the arms revolved like a berserk windmill, the eyes had a hard basilisk stare. This was the kind of physically expressive acting you rarely saw in British theatre at that time.

Fame only hit Rossiter with his sensational performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Opening in Glasgow in 1967, Michael Blakemore’s production took two years to reach London, where Brecht was regarded as box-office poison. But Brecht’s play, which equates the Nazi party with Chicago gangsters and sees Hitler as a demonic thug, offers one of the great star parts, which Rossiter seized with avidity.

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