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

I I first saw Leonard Rossiter as Fred Midway in David Turner’s play Semi-Detached in Belgrade, Coventry in 1963 and it was a revelation. Olivier played the same role in London with understated realism. Rossiter, who like the character had worked in insurance, presented us with a manic Midlands Machiavelli. The rigid legs fired like pistons, the arms turned like a frantic windmill, the eyes had a hard basilisk look. This was the kind of physically expressive acting you rarely saw in British theater at that time.

Fame only reached Rossiter with his sensational performance in Brecht’s The Resistible Ascension of Arturo Ui. Opening in Glasgow in 1967, Michael Blakemore’s production took two years to reach London, where Brecht was considered 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 starring roles, which Rossiter eagerly seizes.

What he brought was his gift for the grotesque and his ability to find a perfect balance between the menacing and the absurd. Rossiter’s entrance, which involved a dramatic leap through a circular circus-like screen, was made comical by the way pieces of paper stubbornly stuck to his teeth. This was the prelude to a performance in which ferocity and farce were never far apart. Asked to leave a restaurant by a striped capitalist, Rossiter’s head spiraled up like that of a snake about to strike before he raised his top hat with exaggerated politeness.

The highlight came in the scene where Arturo takes behavior lessons from a veteran Shakespearean actor. Instructed to walk on tiptoe, Rossiter stretched his legs in an embryonic goose step. I told him to stand with his hands crossed neutrally in front of him, and he grabbed his crotch with angry intensity. When taught to sit, he attempted a gesture of authority in the style of Roman history, which he realized was more impressive if his arm was not bent, thus achieving the first Nazi salute. It was a brilliant performance and I was fascinated, on one occasion when I interviewed Rossiter, when he told me that, although he was grateful for the role, he hated Brecht politically.

The paradox is that Rossiter was, in a way, the living embodiment of Brecht’s belief that “the actor must make himself observed by placing himself between the spectator and the text”. You saw this when he played the tramp in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1972. Where Donald Pleasence, who originated the role, gave a naturalistic performance and was plausible enough to go out on the streets begging when they filmed the play in Hackney, Rossiter vividly presented the character as a work dropout and a born fantasist who always dreams of reaching Sidcup.

This last point was fundamental to Rossiter’s performance: he had a particular genius for playing characters dominated by a fixed idea. In Make and Break (1980), by Michael Frayn, he was a workaholic salesman totally tied to his job: he even examined Beethoven record covers and Buddhist pamphlets as if they were company balance sheets. And in his final performance as Inspector Truscott in Joe Orton’s Loot (1984), he made a definitive study of a demented, obsessive detective: as he took off his hat to prove he was a master of disguise, his eyes had the mad gleam of a force. police officer Walter Mitty.

Even his room owner, Rigsby, on the TV show Rising Damp, was a man permanently haunted by sexual frustration. Whether he was playing monsters or supposedly ordinary men, Rossiter had an unparalleled ability to suggest that a touch of mania makes the whole world kin.