Peter Sellers – actor, screenwriter, director and singer – was born in 1925 and died forty years ago, on July 24, 1980. According to popular opinion, he made many rather ugly films and was reportedly a person who complicated times to work with. But he was also one of the greatest comic talents in the history of cinema, capable of moving from sophisticated satire to physical and almost farcical humor. The role that made him most famous was that of Inspector Clouseau, the films in which he made the most laughs were probably Doctor Strangelove and Hollywood Party. The best one, albeit a little less famous, according to many critics is Beyond the garden.
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Peter Sellers – whose real name was Richard Henry Sellers – was born in Hampshire, England, on September 8, 1925: his parents were variety actors, he learned to dance, to play drums and ukuleles. After the Second World War, during which he became corporal of the RAF, the British Air Force, he had some experience in the theater and worked on the radio doing cabaret. Success came thanks to the BBC program The Goon Show: a comic variety that Sellers took part from 1951 to 1960: started with about 300 thousand listeners, the program reached up to seven million.
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He started making cinema already in the fifties and already in The homicide lady Sellers stood out playing an awkward gangster. In 1962 he got a part in Lolita by Stanley Kubrick, director who would have wanted him, in 1964, for the film Doctor Strangelove, or: how I learned not to worry and love the bomb: Sellers (rumored to have been paid a million dollars, more than half of the film’s total budget) played the President of the United States, British Royal Air Force officer Lionel Mandrake and Dr. Strangelove, a former naturalized American-born Nazi scientist who deals with the development of nuclear weapons and who happens to call the US President “Führer”. Kubrick was known to be a director unwilling to leave acting actors to the actors of his films, but it seems that Sellers left many freedoms instead.
In 1963, Sellers was chosen by Blake Edwards for the part of Inspector Clouseau ne The Pink Panther (initially the role had been entrusted to Peter Ustinov, who after accepting it refused him). Despite their difficult relationship, Edwards and Sellers toured together too A shot in the dark. They should also have made a third film, always with Sellers in the role of Clouseau, but they both chose to do something else, returning to collaborate on that project in the seventies, with The Pink Panther strikes again, The Pink Panther challenges Inspector Clouseau e Revenge of the Pink Panther.
The best known collaboration between Edwards and Sellers was however another: that of 1968 for Hollywood Party, in which Sellers played the clumsy Indian character called Hrundi V. Bakshi (a character that probably wouldn’t be possible today, at least in American cinema). In one of the best-known scenes Sellers, who knew how to imitate different voices and who had started working on the radio, proved to be very good even in a scene that would have gone very well even in silent cinema.
In addition to comic roles Sellers played in 1979 Beyond the garden with Shirley MacLaine. The film was not very successful but Sellers was unanimously appreciated for the role of the protagonist, saying among other things that while all the actors wanted to be Othello, the role he really wanted to do was just that. In fact, he worked for several years for someone to shoot him, with him as the protagonist.
Outside the cinema, Sellers had a very complicated life, well told in You call me Peter, a 2004 film. Sellers, it is said, suffered from depression throughout his life and, especially in the 1970s, he was often described as an actor with whom it was very difficult to work. He once said of himself: “If they asked me to interpret myself I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t know who or what I am ». He died of a heart attack in London in 1980 at the age of 54. At his funeral the song “In the mood” was played: it seems he had wanted it, and it is said that it was a song he detested.
