Peter Sellers

Richard Henry Sellers was born on September 8, 1925, in Southsea, a seaside district of Portsmouth on the southern coast of England ^[1]. His parents, Bill Sellers and Agnes (Peg) Marks, were touring variety performers, and the family name for their only surviving child honored an older brother, Peter, who had been stillborn. From infancy the boy everyone called Peter was carried from theatre to theatre as his parents worked the fading English music hall circuit ^[2].

His mother came from a theatrical dynasty: her grandmother, Welcome Mendoza, had staged aquatic revues under the name Ma Ray, and the family traced its line to the celebrated eighteenth century boxer Daniel Mendoza, a connection Sellers prized throughout his life ^[2]. Peg was Jewish and Bill was Protestant, and Sellers grew up between traditions, attending the Roman Catholic St Aloysius College in Highgate, north London, where the family eventually settled ^[1].

The itinerant childhood left marks. Sellers was doted on by his mother to a degree that biographers have linked to his later restlessness and insecurity, and he changed schools repeatedly as the family moved ^[3]. He showed early skill as a drummer, and as a teenager he worked in provincial theatres, first backstage and then as a musician with touring dance bands. In 1943, during the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force, where poor eyesight kept him from flying duties. He served instead with Ralph Reader's RAF Gang Shows, entertaining troops in India, Ceylon, and Burma, and honing the impersonations of officers that already hinted at his future ^[2].

Demobilized in 1946, Sellers scraped a living in variety halls and holiday camps while auditioning for the BBC. The breakthrough came through nerve as much as talent: he telephoned the radio producer Roy Speer while impersonating the voices of two established stars, Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch, then confessed the trick. Speer, impressed, gave him work, and by 1948 Sellers was appearing regularly on BBC radio ^[2].

The decisive partnership arrived in 1951, when Sellers joined Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and (initially) Michael Bentine in a new BBC radio comedy that became The Goon Show ^[1]. Running until 1960, the programme demolished the conventions of British radio humour with surreal plots, anarchic sound effects, and a gallery of absurd characters. Sellers supplied many of the voices, including the scheming Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, the quavering Henry Crun, and the dim, boastful Major Bloodnok. The show built a devoted following that later included members of the Beatles and the founders of Monty Python, who acknowledged it as a formative influence ^[4].

Radio fame opened the door to cinema. After small parts in the early 1950s, Sellers drew notice as one of the inept criminals alongside Alec Guinness in the Ealing Studios comedy The Ladykillers (1955) ^[1]. His range became unmistakable in The Mouse That Roared (1959), in which he played three separate roles, and in the Boulting brothers' satire I'm All Right Jack (1959). His performance as Fred Kite, the pompous, Stalin admiring shop steward, won him the British Academy Film Award for Best British Actor and established him as a leading man rather than a supporting voice ^[5].

Any account of Peter Sellers achievements begins with two collaborations of the early 1960s. In 1963 the director Blake Edwards cast him as Inspector Jacques Clouseau, a catastrophically clumsy French detective, in The Pink Panther. Conceived as a supporting part opposite David Niven, the role grew under Sellers into the film's comic centre, and a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, followed within a year ^[1]. Clouseau's mangled accent, misplaced confidence, and elaborate physical disasters became Sellers's most commercially durable creation. He returned to the character in the 1970s in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), a run that revived his box office standing ^[5].

The artistic summit came with Stanley Kubrick. In Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Sellers played three roles: the decent RAF officer Lionel Mandrake, the beleaguered American President Merkin Muffley, and the sinister ex-Nazi scientist of the title. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor ^[1]. He had already worked with Kubrick as the manipulated Clare Quilty in Lolita (1962), where the director encouraged the improvisation that suited Sellers's methods ^[3].

A second Oscar nomination came near the end of his life for Being There (1979), Hal Ashby's adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel. As Chance, a simple minded gardener whose blank utterances are mistaken for profundity by Washington's elite, Sellers gave a performance of unusual restraint, and it won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy ^[5]. Between these peaks he ranged widely: the lecherous television writer in Only Two Can Play (1962), which brought another BAFTA nomination, the Indian actor adrift at a Hollywood party in The Party (1968), and dozens of characters across more than fifty films. In 1966 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire ^[2].

Off screen, Sellers was famously elusive, telling interviewers that there was no real Peter Sellers behind the characters. Colleagues described a man who could be generous and funny one day and cold or volatile the next, and his biographers have documented a lifelong dependence on clairvoyants, sudden enthusiasms for cars and gadgets, and an inability to sustain calm domestic life ^[3].

He married four times. His first wife, Anne Howe, whom he married in 1951, was the mother of his children Michael and Sarah; the marriage ended in 1963. The following year he married the Swedish actress Britt Ekland after a whirlwind courtship of a few weeks, and their daughter Victoria was born in 1965 before the couple divorced in 1968. A marriage to Miranda Quarry lasted from 1970 to 1974, and in 1977 he married the actress Lynne Frederick, to whom he remained married, despite estrangement, until his death ^[2].

His health shadowed everything after April 1964, when, at the age of thirty eight and newly married to Ekland, he suffered a series of severe heart attacks in Hollywood while filming Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, from which he had to withdraw ^[2]. He recovered, but the damage was permanent, and he declined bypass surgery in later years in favour of unconventional treatments. His relationships with his children were strained, and his will, which left almost his entire estate to Lynne Frederick, excluded them from all but token bequests ^[3].

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a difficult stretch. After the collapse of the expensive comedy Casino Royale (1967), on which he clashed with co-star Orson Welles and left before filming finished, Sellers appeared in a string of poorly received pictures, and by the early 1970s his commercial standing had fallen sharply ^[3]. Films such as The Magic Christian (1969), made with his friend Ringo Starr, kept him visible without restoring his reputation.

Reunion with Blake Edwards changed his fortunes. The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975 was an international hit, and the two sequels that followed made Clouseau more popular than ever, even as the working relationship between star and director deteriorated into open hostility ^[5]. Sellers spent much of the decade pursuing the rights to Being There, a project he had wanted since reading Kosinski's novel in the early 1970s, convinced that Chance the gardener was the part of his life ^[3].

He was proved right, but he had little time to enjoy it. His heart condition worsened through the late 1970s, sustained by a pacemaker fitted in 1977. On July 22, 1980, two days before a planned reunion dinner in London with his Goon Show partners Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, he collapsed from a massive heart attack at the Dorchester Hotel. He died at the Middlesex Hospital in London on July 24, 1980, at the age of fifty four ^[1]. His last completed starring film, the poorly received The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, was released that same summer. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where, in a final joke arranged in accordance with his known wishes, Glenn Miller's In the Mood was played at the service ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Peter Sellers usually receives two answers at once: the most gifted vocal chameleon of his era, and one of the most troubled men in British entertainment. Both are supported by the record. Critics continue to rank Dr. Strangelove among the finest film comedies ever made, and the American Film Institute placed it high on its lists of the greatest American films and comedies ^[6]. Being There is studied as a model of minimalist comic acting, and the Clouseau films remain in constant circulation.

His influence runs through generations of performers. The Goon Show's absurdist logic fed directly into Monty Python's Flying Circus, and comedians from Peter Cook to Mike Myers and Sacha Baron Cohen have worked in the tradition of total character immersion that Sellers exemplified ^[4]. Blake Edwards attempted to continue the Pink Panther franchise after his death, including a 1982 film assembled from outtakes, but no successor matched the original Clouseau, and a 2006 remake with Steve Martin only sharpened the comparison.

The posthumous literature has been unsparing. Roger Lewis's 1994 biography The Life and Death of Peter Sellers portrayed a hollow and destructive personality behind the genius, and it became the basis of a 2004 HBO and BBC film starring Geoffrey Rush, which won Emmy and Golden Globe awards ^[3]. Documentaries, memoirs by his wives and children, and continuing scholarly attention have kept the debate about the man alive. For readers of any Peter Sellers biography, the essential Peter Sellers facts endure regardless of the arguments: a boy from Southsea music hall who became, on radio and film, several dozen unforgettable people, while insisting to the end that he himself was nobody at all ^[1].