Peter Sellers

The Full Biography

Peter Sellers. Actor. The Southsea kid who made a vacancy into a method, then died at fifty-four with Clouseau still occupying the rooms he would not live in.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a mustache, a trench coat, a man destroying a room in the name of French police work. The Pink Panther. What the still cannot show is Richard Henry Sellers of Southsea, a Jewish vaudeville household, a Goon, a man who told interviewers he had no personality of his own, and a heart that had already failed more than once before the last failure in 1980.

He was born on September 8, 1925, in Southsea, Portsmouth, to William “Bill” Sellers and Agnes Doreen “Peg” Marks, both variety people. He was christened Richard Henry. They called him Peter after a stillborn elder brother. Peg was the weather. He was carried onstage at two weeks at the Kings Theatre; the crowd sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and the infant cried. The family toured. In 1935 they settled in Muswell Hill. Bill was Protestant, Peg Jewish; the boy went to St Aloysius’ College, Highgate, a Catholic school, until fourteen, when Peg would not let him be evacuated. He worked the Victoria Palace in Ilfracombe for an uncle: caretaker, box office, usher, lights, small parts. Joe Daniels taught him drums. Spike Milligan said he might have stayed a jazz drummer if the voices had not been louder. ENSA. Impersonations of George Formby. In September 1943 the RAF; poor eyesight kept him off the stick. Ralph Reader’s Gang Show took him through Britain, India, Ceylon, Burma, then Germany and France.

After demobilisation the work was sporadic. Windmill Theatre, 1948, comedy between the nudes. He telephoned BBC producer Roy Speer pretending to be Kenneth Horne and was called a cheeky young sod and given an audition anyway. Radio. Ted Ray. Then Grafton’s pub, where he met Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine. The Goon Show began as a trial tape in February 1951 and ran until January 28, 1960. Sellers was Major Bloodnok, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, Bluebottle, Henry Crun, and seventeen smaller men. Seven million listeners at the height. The BBC still files it as the road that launched him. The voices were the instrument. The man, he said, was the case the voices lived in.

The door to pictures was the 1950s British shop. He studied Alec Guinness on the set of The Ladykillers (1955) — “my ideal and my idol” — and played Harry Robinson, the Teddy Boy. The Smallest Show on Earth (1957), a sixty-eight-year-old projectionist at thirty-two. The Naked Truth with Terry-Thomas. The Mouse That Roared (1959), three roles: grand duchess, prime minister, farm boy invading America. I’m All Right Jack (1959), Fred Kite, a shop steward the country recognized and resented; he watched footage of union men; the picture was the highest-grossing British film of 1960; a BAFTA. The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, eleven minutes shot with Milligan and Richard Lester, was nominated for an Oscar as a live-action short. Two Parlophone albums produced by George Martin, The Best of Sellers and Songs for Swingin’ Sellers, both reached number three. “Balham — Gateway to the South” is still a climate.

The Millionairess (1960) opposite Sophia Loren made him an Indian doctor and a man who declared love in front of his wife. The novelty single “Goodness Gracious Me” went to number four. Whether the romance was an affair or a hunger depends on which friend you ask. He directed himself in Mr. Topaze (1961) and rarely spoke of it again. Only Two Can Play (1962), from Kingsley Amis, a Welsh librarian, another BAFTA nomination. Then Kubrick. Lolita (1962), Clare Quilty — a vacancy that is also a threat. Sellers doubted he could play “a fantastic nightmare, part homosexual, part drug addict, part sadist.” Kubrick told him to improvise and called the result comic ecstasy. Dilys Powell, in The Sunday Times, called it a firework.

Blake Edwards gave him Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963) after Peter Ustinov backed out. David Niven was billed above him. Sellers invented the costume, the accent, the mustache, the trench coat, and the dignity of a man who thinks he is one of the world’s best detectives. He took ninety thousand pounds for five weeks in Rome and Cortina. The picture was a top-ten grosser. A Shot in the Dark (1964) made the inspector the whole weather: Herbert Lom as Dreyfus, Burt Kwouk as Cato, notes passed on set because Edwards and Sellers had stopped speaking. Then Dr. Strangelove (1964), three roles Kubrick had wanted as four: President Merkin Muffley, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, Dr. Strangelove with a hand that will not obey. The Texas major, King Kong, went to Slim Pickens after Sellers sprained an ankle leaving a restaurant and could not work the cockpit. The three were a cathedral. He was nominated. He did not win.

On the night of April 5, 1964, in California, after amyl nitrite, he had eight heart attacks in three hours and was pulled from Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid. Wilder was unsympathetic. Sellers recovered enough to finish a United Nations television film, Carol for Another Christmas, and to doubt his memory, then found the memory intact. He married Britt Ekland ten days after they met; Victoria was born in 1965; the marriage was jealousy and a chair thrown on After the Fox (1966) and a CBE collected with makeup over a scratched face. Peg died while he was shooting The Bobo (1967); he stayed on the set and was remorseful for the rest of the life. What’s New Pussycat? (1965), insured at a third of a million because of the heart, was the first Woody Allen screenplay and a hit. Casino Royale (1967), a million-dollar contract, seven writers, a feud with Orson Welles, a walk-off before the part was finished. The Party (1968), Hrundi V. Bakshi, an Indian actor at a Hollywood dinner, Clouseau’s cousin in a different coat, a performance Roger Lewis called dignified. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), an attorney who becomes a hippie. The Magic Christian (1969) with Ringo Starr, from Terry Southern, a gala the royal family sat through and critics called brutal. There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970) with Goldie Hawn, the seventh-most-popular film at the British box office that year, a small revival of a man sending up his own vanity. Then a stretch Milligan called a period of indifference: Hoffman (1970), Where Does It Hurt? (1972), Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), pictures unreleased, pictures that flopped. He won Best Actor at Tehran in 1973 for The Optimists of Nine Elms, a street performer, a quiet that did not become a climate. He cancelled Michael Parkinson as himself and arrived as Gestapo, then stepped out of the costume and was brilliant.

I have no personality of my own. I’m a collection of other people’s.Peter Sellers

He came back to Clouseau because a séance, he said, put Dan Leno in the room with advice, and because the gates demanded it, and because he knew how. The Return of the Pink Panther (1975). The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). The Clouseaus of those years are a living. They are also a man in a costume that would not take itself off.

Being There (1979), as Chance the gardener, is the last monument. A vacancy that the powerful mistake for wisdom. Shirley MacLaine. Melvyn Douglas. He played almost nothing and it was everything. He was nominated. He won the Golden Globe. He did not win the Oscar; Dustin Hoffman did, for Kramer vs. Kramer. He had already had heart attacks. He married again. He made another picture. On July 24, 1980, in London, the heart stopped. He was fifty-four.

The turn is Chance, and the refusal to be only Clouseau at the end. A lot of comic actors die as their best-known voice. He died as a silence. The Goon, the three Strangeloves, the inspector, the gardener: a complete life is a list of people who were not him. He said so. The file should not contradict him and should not romanticize the vacancy. It was a method. It was also a cost.

He married Anne Howe in 1951; Michael in 1954; Sarah in 1957; a divorce in 1963 after he asked the children which parent they loved more and, hearing the wrong answer, threw them out. Britt Ekland, 1964 to 1968; Victoria. Miranda Quarry, 1970 to 1974. Lynne Frederick in 1977. Friends from the Goon years describe a professional who could be tender and impossible in the same afternoon. He consulted the astrologer Maurice Woodruff. He believed Dan Leno, dead since 1904, guided him. He was a Water Rat. The Sellers on a Clouseau set was a man who had already been a climate and was now a costume the public would not release. Both are the life.

The later years

The last five years were a revival that looked like a sentence. He did not get an elder lap. He got the mustache again, then a gardener, then a last costume that did not deserve him.

• The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) — Edwards, Christopher Plummer as the phantom, Clouseau back because the 1960s pictures had become a television climate and the gates wanted more.
• The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) — Dreyfus trying to kill the world to kill the inspector. Another heart scare on the work. He finished the picture.
• Murder by Death (1976) — Neil Simon’s parody house. A Chinese detective in a night of borrowed sleuths.
• March 20, 1977 — a second major attack on a flight from Paris to London. A pacemaker. On February 18 he had married Lynne Frederick, twenty-three years younger. The household of the last morning was already set.
• Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) — the last Clouseau he completed. The costume outlived the vacancy.
• The Prisoner of Zenda (1979) — multiple roles again, a farce that did not become a climate.
• Being There (1979) — Hal Ashby, from Jerzy Kosiński. Chance waters the garden and is taken for a sage. The last monument. A Golden Globe. An Oscar nomination. The silence after the mustache.
• The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980) — a last picture no one defends. He was already a man on a medical schedule.

Hal Ashby shot Being There as almost nothing: a gardener who watches television, wears what the set gives him, and is mistaken for a sage by Washington. Jerzy Kosiński’s novel had already imagined the vacancy. Sellers had chased the part for years. He played Chance at a volume just above silence. Shirley MacLaine’s Eve is the hunger the vacancy does not answer. Melvyn Douglas’s senator is the power that hears wisdom in a weather report. The last shot, walking on water, is a joke and a theology. The Golden Globe went to him. The Oscar went to Hoffman. Both facts are the file.

In May 1980 he collapsed in Dublin shooting a commercial. He went to Cannes anyway and looked unwell. Friends urged an angiogram at Cedars-Sinai for July 30, to see whether open-heart surgery was possible. He did not reach the appointment. On July 24, in London, the heart stopped. Edwards kept making Clouseau pictures. Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) stitched unused footage into a ghost. The costume outlived the man who claimed to have no self. That is a kind of afterlife he might have recognized.

He had told a reporter, when the reporter began to mention the attacks, that he planned to give them up; he was down to two a day. Gallows. True enough. The gardener is the file. The mustache is the climate.

After he was gone

Every inspector who cannot open a door still pays him a tax. Every actor who plays nothing on purpose still owes Chance. The Goons still play on British radio memory. Kubrick still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the right triple bill. Michael and Victoria remain. Lynne inherited and the courts argued. Clouseau is the climate. The gardener is the file.

He came out of a vaudeville house, made a weekly surrealism, played three men for Kubrick, put on a mustache the gates would not let him remove, played a vacancy that the powerful mistook for God, and died in London at fifty-four. If you only remember Clouseau, you have the still. If you remember the Goons, the three Strangeloves, and Chance, you have him.

Portrait: Allan Warren (retouch by Keraunoscopia) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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