Peter Sellers (born Richard Henry Sellers; 8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980) was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence with his performances on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers was featured on a number of hit comic songs and became internationally acclaimed for his film roles, most notably as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.
Sellers made his stage debut at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, as an infant, and began accompanying his parents in a touring variety act. He worked as a drummer and toured around England as a member of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). He developed his mimicry and improvisational skills during a spell in Ralph Reader's wartime Gang Show entertainment troupe. After the war, Sellers made his radio debut in ShowTime, and eventually became a regular performer on various BBC Radio shows. In 1951, Sellers, along with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine, began starring in the successful radio series The Goon Show, which ended in 1960.
Sellers began his film career during the 1950s. Although the bulk of his work was comedic, often parodying characters of authority such as military officers or policemen, he also performed in other film genres. Films demonstrating his artistic range include The Ladykillers (1955), The Mouse That Roared (1959), I'm All Right Jack (1959), The Millionairess (1960), Lolita (1962), five films of the Pink Panther series (1963–1978), Dr. Strangelove (1964), What's New Pussycat? (1965), Casino Royale (1967), The Party (1968), I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), The Magic Christian (1969), Being There (1979), and The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980). Sellers's versatility enabled him to portray a wide range of comic characters using different accents and guises, and he would often assume multiple roles within the same film, frequently with contrasting temperaments and styles. Satire and black humour were major features of many of his films, as they had been in his radio and record performances. These performances had a strong influence on a number of later comedians.
Sellers was nominated three times for an Academy Award, twice for Best Actor, for his performances in Dr. Strangelove and Being There, and once for the Best Live Action Short Film for The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1959). He won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his role in I'm All Right Jack and was nominated an additional three times for the satire Only Two Can Play, for Dr. Strangelove and The Pink Panther, and for Being There. In 1980 he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his role in Being There, having previously been nominated three times in the same category. Turner Classic Movies calls Sellers "one of the most accomplished comic actors of the late 20th century".
In his personal life, Sellers struggled with depression and insecurities. An enigmatic figure, he often claimed to have no identity outside the roles that he played. His behaviour was often erratic and compulsive, and he frequently clashed with his directors and co-stars, especially in the mid-1970s, when his physical and mental health, together with his alcohol and drug problems, were at their worst. Sellers was married four times and had three children from his first two marriages. He died from a heart attack, aged 54, in 1980. English filmmakers the Boulting brothers described Sellers as "the greatest comic genius this country has produced since Charles Chaplin".
In 1935 the Sellers family moved to North London and settled in Muswell Hill. Although Bill Sellers was Protestant and Peg was Jewish, Sellers attended the nearby Roman Catholic school St Aloysius' College in Highgate, run by the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy. For Sellers, the BBC considers it had the effect of launching his career "on the road to stardom".
In 1951 the Goons made their feature film debut in Penny Points to Paradise. Sellers and Milligan then wrote the script for Let's Go Crazy, the earliest film to showcase Sellers's ability to portray a series of different characters within the same film, and he made another appearance opposite his Goons co-stars in the 1952 flop, Down Among the Z Men. In 1954, Sellers was cast opposite Sid James, Tony Hancock, Raymond Huntley, Donald Pleasence, and Eric Sykes in the British Lion Film Corporation comedy production, Orders Are Orders. John Grierson believes that this was Sellers's breakthrough role on screen and credits this film with launching the film careers of both Sellers and Hancock.
1955–1959: The Ladykillers, The Mouse That Roared, I'm All Right Jack, and other early films
Sellers pursued a film career and took a number of small roles, such as a police officer in John and Julie (1955). He accepted a larger part in the 1955 Alexander Mackendrick-directed Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, in which he starred opposite his idol Alec Guinness, in addition to Herbert Lom and Cecil Parker. Sellers portrayed Harry Robinson, the Teddy Boy; biographer Peter Evans considers this Sellers's first good role. The Ladykillers was a success in the UK and the US, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The following year Sellers appeared in a further three television comedy series with one of his Goon Show co-stars, Spike Milligan: The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d, A Show Called Fred, and Son of Fred. The shows aired on Britain's new ITV channel.
In 1957 film producer Michael Relph, impressed with Sellers's portrayal of an elderly character in Idiot Weekly, cast the 32-year-old actor as a 68-year-old projectionist in Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth, supporting Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna, and Margaret Rutherford. The film was a commercial success and is now thought of as a minor classic of post-war British screen comedy. Sellers provided the growling voice of Winston Churchill to the BAFTA award-winning film The Man Who Never Was. Later in 1957 Sellers portrayed a television star with a talent for disguises in Mario Zampi's offbeat black comedy The Naked Truth, opposite Terry-Thomas, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton, and Dennis Price.
thumb|left|upright|[[Terry-Thomas (pictured in 1968) starred with Sellers in four films between 1957 and 1959. Their last film together, I'm All Right Jack – the highest-grossing film at the British box office in 1960 – saw Sellers receive the BAFTA Award for Best British Actor.]]
Sellers's difficulties in getting his film career to take off and increasing problems in his personal life prompted him to seek periodic consultations with astrologer Maurice Woodruff, who held considerable sway over his later career. After a chance meeting with a North American Indian spirit guide in the 1950s, Sellers became convinced that the music hall comedian Dan Leno, who had died in 1904, haunted him and guided his career and life decisions. Sellers was a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, the exclusive theatrical fraternity founded by Leno in 1890. In 1958 Sellers starred with David Tomlinson, Wilfrid Hyde-White, David Lodge, and Lionel Jeffries as a chief petty officer in Val Guest's Up the Creek.
Guest later said he had written and directed the film as a vehicle for Sellers and thus had started Sellers's film career. To practise his voice, Sellers purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The film received critical acclaim in the United States, and Roger Lewis viewed it as an important practice ground for Sellers. Next, Sellers featured with Terry-Thomas as one of a pair of comic villains in George Pal's Tom Thumb (1958), a musical fantasy film, opposite Russ Tamblyn, Jessie Matthews, and Peter Butterworth. Terry-Thomas later said that "my part was perfect, but Peter's was bloody awful. He wasn't difficult about it, but he knew it". The performance was a landmark in Sellers's career and became his first contact with the Hollywood film industry.
Sellers released his first album in 1958 called The Best of Sellers: a collection of comic songs and sketches, among them Balham - Gateway to the South, where Sellers plays a variety of comic characters. Produced by George Martin and released on Parlophone, the album reached number three in the UK Albums Chart.
After completing I'm All Right Jack, Sellers returned to record a new series of The Goon Show. Over the course of two weekends, he took his 16mm cine-camera to Totteridge Lane in London and filmed himself, Spike Milligan, Mario Fabrizi, Leo McKern, and Richard Lester. Originally intended as a private film, the eleven-minute Running Jumping & Standing Still Film was screened at the 1959 Edinburgh and San Francisco film festivals. It won the award for best fiction short in the latter festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject (Live Action). In 1959, Sellers released his second album, Songs for Swingin' Sellers, which—like his first record—reached number three in the UK Albums Chart.
1960–1963: The Millionairess, Lolita, first divorce, and The Pink Panther
In early 1960, Sellers starred as "Dodger" Lane in the prison comedy Two Way Stretch. Later that year, he portrayed an Indian doctor, Dr Ahmed el Kabir, in Anthony Asquith's romantic comedy The Millionairess, a film based on a George Bernard Shaw play of the same name. Sellers was not interested in the role until he learned that Sophia Loren would be his co-star. When asked about Loren, he explained to reporters, "I don't normally act with romantic, glamorous women ... She's a lot different from Harry Secombe." Sellers and Loren developed such a close relationship during filming, he declared his love for her in front of his wife at the time, Anne Howe, and woke his son one night to ask if he should divorce from Howe. There is uncertainty whether the relationship was anything more than platonic: a number of people, including Spike Milligan, consider it an affair, while others, including Graham Stark, think it remained only a strong friendship. Anne Howe afterwards commented, "I don't know to this day whether he had an affair with her. Nobody does."
Roger Lewis observed that Sellers immersed himself completely in the characters he enacted during productions, that "He'd play a role as an Indian doctor, and for the next six months, he'd be an Indian in his real [daily] life." The film inspired the George Martin-produced novelty hit single "Goodness Gracious Me", with Sellers and Loren, which reached number four in the UK Singles Chart in November 1960.
In 1961, Sellers made his directorial debut with Mr. Topaze, in which he also starred. The film was based on the Marcel Pagnol play Topaze. Sellers portrayed an ex-schoolmaster in a small French town who turns to a life of crime to obtain wealth. The film and Sellers's directorial abilities received unenthusiastic responses from the public and critics, and Sellers rarely referred to it again. The same year, he starred in the Sidney Gilliat-directed Only Two Can Play, a film based on the novel That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis. He was nominated for the Best British Actor award at the 16th British Academy Film Awards for his role as John Lewis, a frustrated Welsh librarian whose affections swing between the glamorous Liz (Mai Zetterling) and his long-suffering wife Jean (Virginia Maskell). Stanley Kubrick asked Sellers to play the role of Clare Quilty in the 1962 film Lolita, opposite James Mason and Shelley Winters. Kubrick had seen Sellers in The Battle of the Sexes and listened to the album The Best of Sellers, and was impressed by the range of characters he could portray.
thumb|left|upright|Picture of Sellers used in a road safety advertisement endorsed by the [[Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents in August 1962]]
Sellers was apprehensive about accepting the role, doubting his ability to successfully portray the part of a flamboyant American television playwright who was, according to Sellers, "a fantastic nightmare, part homosexual, part drug addict, part sadist". Kubrick encouraged Sellers to improvise and stated that he often reached a "state of comic ecstasy". Kubrick had American jazz producer Norman Granz record portions of the script for Sellers to listen to, so he could study the voice and develop confidence, granting Sellers a free artistic licence. Sellers later claimed that his relationship with Kubrick became one of the most rewarding of his career. Writing in The Sunday Times, Dilys Powell commented that Sellers gave "a firework performance, funny, malicious, only once for a few seconds overreaching itself, and in the murder scene which is both prologue and epilogue achieving the macabre in comedy." Sellers's behaviour towards his family worsened in 1962. On one occasion, he asked his son Michael and his daughter Sarah which parent they loved more; neither mentioned him alone, so they were thrown out and disowned. At the end of the year, his marriage to Anne broke down.
thumb|upright|Sellers as [[Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963)]]
In 1963, Sellers starred as gang leader "Pearly Gates" in Cliff Owen's The Wrong Arm of the Law, followed by his portrayal of a vicar in Heavens Above!
Sellers was approached by director Blake Edwards to play the role of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther after Peter Ustinov had backed out of the film. Edwards later recalled his feelings as "desperately unhappy and ready to kill, but as fate would have it, I got Mr. Sellers instead of Mr. Ustinov—thank God!" Sellers accepted a fee of £90,000 (£ in pounds) for five weeks' work on location in Rome and Cortina. The film starred David Niven in the principal role, with two other actors—Capucine and Claudia Cardinale—having more prominent roles than Sellers. However, Sellers's performance is regarded as being on par with that of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, according to biographer Peter Evans. Although the Clouseau character was in the script, Sellers created the personality, devising the costume, accent, make-up, moustache and trench coat.
The Pink Panther was released in the UK in January 1964 and received a mixed reception from the critics, although Penelope Gilliatt, writing in The Observer, remarked that Sellers had a "flawless sense of mistiming" in a performance that was "one of the most delicate studies in accident-proneness since the silents". and for a Best British Actor award at the 18th British Academy Film Awards. although the critic from The Guardian thought his portrayal of the RAF officer alone was "worth the price of an admission ticket". For his performance in all three roles, Sellers was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor at the 37th Academy Awards and the Best British Actor award at the 18th British Academy Film Awards.
Towards the end of filming, in early February 1964, Sellers met Britt Ekland, a Swedish actress who had arrived in London to film Guns at Batasi. On 19 February 1964, just ten days after their first meeting, the couple married. Sellers soon showed signs of insecurity and paranoia; he would become highly anxious and jealous, for example, when Ekland starred opposite attractive men. Shortly after the wedding, Sellers started filming on location in Twentynine Palms, California, for Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, opposite Dean Martin and Kim Novak. The relationship between Wilder and Sellers became strained; both had different approaches to work and often clashed as a result. On the night of 5 April 1964, prior to having sex with Ekland, Sellers inhaled amyl nitrite (poppers) as a sexual stimulant in his search for "the ultimate orgasm" and suffered a series of eight heart attacks over the course of three hours as a result. His illness forced him to withdraw from the filming of Kiss Me, Stupid and he was replaced by Ray Walston. Wilder was unsympathetic about the heart attacks, saying that "you have to have a heart before you can have an attack".
After some time recovering, Sellers returned to filming in October 1964, playing King of the Individualists alongside Ekland in Carol for Another Christmas,