Leonard Rossiter Movies and Career Information

Leonard Rossiter (21 October 1926 – 5 October 1984) was an English actor with careers in film, television and theatre. He is known for his roles as Rupert Rigsby, in the British comedy television series Rising Damp (1974–78), and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–79), as well as a series of Cinzano commercials (1978–1983), with Joan Collins. 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 (1939–1946) and it was his ambition to go to university to read modern languages and become a teacher. Tragically his father, a voluntary ambulanceman during the Second World War, was killed in an air-raid in 1942 and so, having his mother to support, Rossiter was unable to afford to take up the place he had been offered by Liverpool University. Having been demobbed (he served as a sergeant in the Army Education Corps and spent much of his National Service in Germany writing letters home for soldiers), he went to work as an insurance clerk in the claims and accidents department of the Commercial Union