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Peter Sellers
Scroll down for movie list.
Spouse
Lynne Frederick (1977 - 1980) (his death)
'Anne Howe' (1951 - 1961) (divorced)
'Miranda Quarry' (1969-1971) (divorced)
Britt Ekland (19 February 1964 - 1968) (divorced)
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Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Notwithstanding the devilishly assured grin that he flashed in candid photographs, Peter Sellers was an extremely ordinary-looking fellow. What was extraordinary about him was his ability to mold those plain features into any number of comedic countenances, a talent that enabled him to create many memorable characters in the movies in which he appeared. Spending his late teens in the RAF as part of a camp entertainment troupe, the talented young Sellers worked with legendary British comic Spike Milligan on the BBC's popular "The Goon Show." With an uncanny gift for mimicry, he became a prolific voice dubber (and reportedly looped some lines for Humphrey Bogart in 1954's Beat the Devil then started to work on-screen as well, notably in The Ladykillers (1955, with Alec Guinness), Your Past Is Showing (1957, in multiple roles; original British title, The Naked Truth), The Smallest Show on Earth (1957, as a befuddled old movie projectionist), and tom thumb (1958, teamed with Terry-Thomas for some buffoonish villainy). In 1959 he won the British equivalent of the Oscar for his performance as a labor leader in I'm All Right Jack starred in Richard Lester's very funny short-subject The Running, Jumping, and Standing-Still Film then showed off his versatility by playing three roles in the hilarious satire The Mouse That Roared Multiple role-playing is an honored tradition among British comic actors, and Sellers apotheosized that tradition while simultaneously bringing it up to date on the big screen. His one-role-only turns of the early 1960s are rather colorless compared with his multifaceted Clare Quilty in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962). The director was reportedly so taken with Sellers' abilities that he kept expanding the movie's scenario to accommodate them, and he subsequently had Sellers play a milquetoast U.S. president, a pragmatic British soldier, and a mutant German scientist in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, an Oscar-nominated performance).
After Kubrick, the director with whom Sellers fared best was Blake Edwards, for whom he played the indefatigably inept French detective Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series (beginning with 1964's The Pink Panther and encompassing six films featuring Sellers, the last of which, 1982's Trail of the Pink Panther Edwards assembled out of previously unseen footage). He was also memorable as a luckless Indian actor in Edwards' slapstick gagfest The Party (1968). When not in Edwards' movies, Sellers spent the late 1960s and early 1970s in faux-hip films of varying success, including What's New, Pussycat? (1965) and the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967). In 1979 he fulfilled a longtime ambition by playing Chauncey Gardener, a human tab ula rasa, in the film adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There the role won Sellers a great deal of acclaim from critics and audiences alike, and an Oscar nomination. It was a welcome return to form for Sellers, who'd been squandering his talent of late in a string of (mostly) awful films on both sides of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, this turned out to be something of a last hurrah; long troubled by a weakened heart, he died the following year. Married four times, Sellers was once wed to actress Britt Ekland, with whom he worked in The Bobo (1967). |  |
