[2] Rose spent four years with the Old Vic company and made his Broadway debut in a 1946 production of Henry IV, Part I and continued to play in New York City and London's West End for the remainder of the decade.

Notable film credits include The Pickwick Papers (1952), Track the Man Down (1955), A Night to Remember (1958), The Flesh and the Fiends (1959), Hawaii (1966), and A New Leaf (1971).

Other television credits include Naked City, Trials of O'Brien, the mini-series Holocaust (1978), and several appearances on the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

On Broadway, among other roles, he played the First Gravedigger in John Gielgud's 1964 production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, a suspicious storekeeper in William Hanley's Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (1964), a bitter soldier in Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt of the Sun (1965), and the detective in Joe Orton's Loot (1968).

In the 1974 comedy My Fat Friend, opposite Lynn Redgrave, he won a Drama Desk Award and received another Tony nomination.

Darling and Captain Hook in Peter Pan and as one of Rex Harrison's co-stars in The Kingfisher;[5] he won a 1979 Drama Desk Award for the last.

In 1980, he appeared as Major General Stanley in the hit Joe Papp adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, co-starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, being nominated for another Tony award.