Peter Sellers

A Total Lack of Identity

Peter Sellers often said he had no personality of his own because he had poured all of it into his celebrities. It wasn't a stock line meant to win sympathy in interviews. It was a veiled medical diagnosis.

Sellers was an empty man who only came alive through someone else's script.

In 1951, he began blowing out the BBC's audience meters with The Goon Show. There he refined the art of vocal schizophrenia. But movies demanded a physical presence he didn't yet fully control. Everything changed when he worked under Alexander Mackendrick in The Ladykillers in 1955. That role as a skinny, nervous criminal opened the doors of the major studios for him.

And then came the obsession with detail. Because Sellers didn't just act; he transformed himself until he was unrecognizable even to his own co-stars.

The Accident of Inspector Clouseau

Inspector Clouseau was born almost by accident in 1963. Peter Ustinov turned down the lead role, and Sellers came in at the last minute to shoot The Pink Panther. He was paid a pittance compared with his later contracts, but he took full control of physical comedy in Europe. And he did it without batting an eye.

Blake Edwards, the director, ended up loathing him. They communicated through notes so they wouldn't come to blows on set. But money talked, and the franchise dragged on for years even though the actor despised the character.

Stanley Kubrick pushed himself to the limit in 1964. In Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, he played three different roles because the studio didn't trust the film unless he appeared on screen constantly. The shoot was a hellish mix of improvisations and anxiety attacks. Sellers demanded to be paid one million dollars for that grueling job.

It was his creative peak and the beginning of his physical decline.

The Man of a Thousand Faces and No Friends

His private life was a wreck of failed marriages and compulsive obsessions with technology. He bought luxury cars and sold them the following week out of sheer boredom. In 1964, he suffered eight heart attacks in a single day after taking amyl nitrite. He survived by a miracle, but his heart was permanently compromised.

But his great professional obsession was Being There. It took him almost a decade to convince the producers to adapt Jerzy Kosinski's novel. In 1979, he played Chance with an icy restraint that nobody expected from a comedian used to noise.

That film earned him an Oscar nomination, which he didn't win. Many critics consider that illiterate gardener to be the true Peter Sellers.

He died in London on July 24, 1980.

He was 54 years old and weighed just 60 kilos. His final technical wish was that In the Mood by Glenn Miller be played during his funeral, because he detested that tune and wanted to make the attendees uncomfortable one last time.