Movies starring Leonard Rossiter

Biography: 
Leonard Rossiter was born on October 21st, 1926 in Liverpool. Unable to afford to go to university, he worked in an insurance office until he was 27, when he joined Preston repertory company and made his professional stage debut in The Gay Dog. After Preston, he starred in productions at Wolverhampton, Salisbury and The Old Vic Company at Bristol's Theatre Royal. In 1962 he made his first big-scre ...  show all 

Rising Damp (1980)

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Genres: Comedy
Countries: UK
Actors: Leonard Rossiter | Frances de la Tour | Denholm Elliott | Don Warrington | Christopher Strauli | Carrie Jones | Glynn Edwards | John Cater | Derek Griffiths | Ronnie Brody | Alan Clare | Jonathan Cecil | Bill Dean | Pat Roach
Directors: Joseph McGrath
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First broadcast in 1974, the ITV bedsitland sitcom Rising Damp was an instant and enduring success. It starred Leonard Rossiter as the miserly and lovelorn landlord Rigsby who is constantly needling young lodger Alan (Richard Beckinsale), a science student whose long hair and earrings are symptomatic to Rigsby of the parlous effeminacy of the modern age. He’s also in love with Frances De La Tour’s dowdy spinster Miss Jones, though his tentative advances are forever rebuffed. She in turn carries a torch for Philip (Don Warrington), the elegant son of an African chief who also resides at Rigsby Towers.

Some aspects of Rising Damp have not aged well, principally Rigsby’s stream of racist jibes at Philip. Although these were doubtless well-meant and supposed to illustrate Rigsby’s foolish bigotry, you suspect that that was a convenient cover for audiences in the 1970s to enjoy racist humour. However, Rossiter’s Rigsby—stuttering, stammering, bent perpetually over backwards—remains a great comic creation, embodying all the festering prejudices, small-mindedness and self-delusion of the lower middle class Little Englander.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Genres: Comedy | Crime
Countries: UK | USA
Actors: Peter Sellers | Herbert Lom | Lesley-Anne Down | Burt Kwouk | Colin Blakely | Leonard Rossiter | André Maranne | Byron Kane | Howard K. Smith | Dick Crockett | Richard Vernon | Briony McRoberts | Dudley Sutton | Murray Kash | Hal Galili
Directors: Blake Edwards
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Charles Dreyfus escapes from the mental asylum and tries to kill Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau. He doesn’t succeed at first, so he takes on another strategy, namely to build a Doom’s Day machine and demand that someone else kills Jacques Clouseau, or Dreyfus will use the machine to wipe out whole cities and even whole countries… With about 22 assassins from all over the globe on his tail, Clouseau decides to find Dreyfus alone and put him back in the mental asylum.