Another Candidate!

28th June 2014




Leonard Rossiter died in his dressing room at the Lyric Theatre in London where he was starring in Joe Orton’s black comedy Loot.

The squash-playing, keep-fit enthusiast had a heart attack that was sudden and unexpected.

A unique aspect of the tributes to the much-loved actor and TV sitcom star was the paucity of wicked anecdotes about him. There were none of those villainous tales that are normally whispered back-stage about major stars.

As his biographer Guy Adams observes, Rossiter approached acting ‘as a job, as solid and practical as book-keeping or car mechanics’.

Now, 30 years after the actor’s death in 1984 at the age of just 57, an anecdote of unique wickedness has finally emerged.

What’s more, it is as potentially destructive to the memory of the star of TV’s Rising Damp and The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin as an unexploded bomb discovered under the floorboards — and just as distressing to his 87-year-old widow Gillian Raine.

In the continuing fall-out of the sordid Jimmy Savile affair, a 66-year-old fellow actor is alleging that in 1968, when he was 18 and working as an extra on a BBC2 drama in which Rossiter was starring, he was sexually abused twice while an ‘excited’ Rossiter watched.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2672922/Sex-predator-victim-great-celeb-witchhunt-Police-probe-46-year-old-allegation-against-late-comedy-genius-Leonard-Rossiter.html#ixzz35vDV8VHg