‘It was hard not to stare at him all the time’: inside the remarkable rise and shocking loss of Leonard Rossiter

‘It was hard not to stare at him all the time’: inside the remarkable rise and shocking loss of Leonard Rossiter

Best known for sitcoms Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the actor died 40 years ago during a performance of Loot, aged 57. Co-stars, colleagues and friends remember a brilliant, singular and demanding man

A few years ago, the actor Robert Duvall was being interviewed for this paper when, apropos of nothing, he cited Leonard Rossiter as the finest performer he’d ever seen. Four decades after Rossiter’s death, his singular style – manic energy, machine-gun delivery, splenetic intelligence – continues to carry remarkable currency.

Rossiter became a household name in the UK for two 1970s sitcoms, which ran concurrently on BBC One and ITV, but he was also a hugely respected stage actor. Film stardom eluded him, despite regular work with John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson and the adoration of Stanley Kubrick. Yet it might have followed: at the time of his death, he was lined up to play the role eventually taken by Tim Curry in Clue.

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