The "impostor delusion" of former SNL/SCTV star Tony Rosato

If you grew up in the '80s, Tony Rosato will be a familiar face. He was a regular on the last season of the classic comedy series SCTV, and he also had the dubious fortune to be a part of the cast of Saturday Night Live during the grim days just after the original "Not Ready for Prime-Time Players" left. He was a highly versatile player on both shows, doing funny impressions of everybody from Lou Costello to Tony Orlando to Ed Meese. His career peaked in the early '80s, but he worked consistently afterwards, doing plenty of guest-starring roles on various comedies and dramas, and in the early '90s he became famous to a new generation when he played Luigi the plumber in The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Super Mario World cartoons. By early in the new millennium, he had moved back to Canada and was still getting acting roles in occasional projects.

But in 2003, things went very wrong for Rosato. During a split-up with his wife Leah, he became convinced that she and their daughter had been replaced by impostors. He was suffering from a rare mental illness called Capgras delusion, and over the next two years he repeatedly contacted police, trying to convince them that his wife and child had been abducted and lookalikes had taken their place. On May 5, 2005, he was arrested and charged with criminal harassment against Leah. Rosato fired eight lawyers, all the while refusing to plead insanity. Although he was not violent, Rosato was placed in a maximum security detention center, where he languished for the next two years awaiting trial.

Rosato's endless legal limbo became a minor scandal in Canada. Prison psychiatrist Dr. Graham Glancy explained to Canada's Star newspaper that Rosato was caught in a sort of legal catch-22: "If you're mentally ill in jail you're likely to spend on average three times as long on remand and in some cases obviously it can go on longer and longer. You have to have assessments to see if you're fit to stand trial. People don't know where to put you afterwards. Mental hospitals won't readily take you ... so you get stuck in the system."

Even Rosato's wife, while admitting she was afraid of him, couldn't understand why he spent so long in jail. She told the Star she was "shocked that it (Rosato's case) has taken this long ... I want him to get mental help ... in a psychiatric hospital. "

Rosato's trial finally began in August of 2007 and lasted until September. He was at last sent to a mental hospital, with a maximum stay of three years. But sadly Rosato's treatment has not been going well. He is currently refusing treatment, and nobody has the legal authority to make him accept treatment.

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