The People

Actor Leonard Rossiter became one of the UK’s biggest television comedy stars in the 1970’s starring in Rising Damp, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin as well as a series of commercials alongside Joan Collins.

Leonard Rossiter was born in Liverpool in 1926, his father was a barber and he was brought up above the family shop attending Lawrence Road School, Granby Street school before going to Liverpool Colliegiate.

Speaking in a BBC Radio Merseyside interview in 1970 he recounted his early memories of Liverpool “We lived in Smithdown Lane which is at the top of Smithdown Road in the Edge Hill area near the Pavillion Theatre.

“My father was a hairdresser and also an illicit bookmaker. I think a lot of his business he did with variety people who played at the Pavilion which was just around the corner.

“After Lawrence Road school we moved and I went to Granby Street school. Then the war came and I was evacuated to Bangor in North Wales and I was there for about 18 months.”

Leonard Rossiter was born in Liverpool

In 1942 his father was killed in an air raid while working as a volunteer ambulance man. Following the war, Leonard returned to Liverpool, and began work as an insurance clerk for Commercial Union. It was while working here that he first became interested in the theatre as he recalled in 1970, “During that time I became interested in the amateur theatre in Liverpool through a girlfriend.

“Gradually my interest in insurance which had not exactly been great in the initial stage became less and less and my interest in the theatre became more.”

After an appearance as an escaped convict in Steptoe and Son he won the leading roles in Rising Damp and then The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin which would shoot him to stardom.

Leonard Rossiter died in 1984 backstage at the Lyric Theatre in London where he was appearing in Loot. In 2002 the broadcaster Sue MacGregor revealed that Rossiter and she had conducted an affair while he had been married to his second wife Gillian.