The enduring brilliance of Peter Sellers: ‘There's never been a better comic actor'

The Guardian

4 days ago

Michael Palin
Along with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers lit up my teenage years. I knew that Connie Francis would never return my love, but Spike and Peter delivered something almost as good – and that was deep, satisfying and highly contagious laughter. Laughter that made me so happy I forgot about my spots.
Spike was the imaginative genius who wrote The Goon Show but it was Sellers who brought me to tears with his gallery of unforgettable characters: Major Bloodnok, Bluebottle, Henry Crun, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne.
He was my hero long before I knew what he looked like. On my first day at Oxford university, I made a lifetime friendship founded on a mutual adoration of the album Songs for Swingin Sellers (with a pair of legs swinging from a branch on the cover). Sellers was not just a man of many voices, he was a gifted actor, and each voice came with a character. The more I heard him the more I wanted to be like him. He showed me there was something far more important than sport and girls and modern history class, and that was making people laugh.
Woody Allen
All I can say about Peter was that apart from all his character skills and voices and technical brilliance, he had a built-in funny quality and made you laugh the minute he appeared on screen. It's nothing you can learn and very few even successful comics have it. I'm sure there was nothing he could do to produce it or understand it himself. It was just magically there, that funniness.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
When I was a kid, my parents and their friends would have these dinner parties, for want of a better term, where the children were all fed first and then shoved into a room with the telly. One night, a film called The Party came on the TV, the one where Sellers plays an Indian actor. I watched it and I remember thinking: 'Is it possible to die from laughing?' Because I was laughing so much I was in pain.
It's a controversial film now but I still love it, in the same way that I always defend It Ain't Half Hot Mum. We're living in a time where people strip things of context, and either celebrate or denigrate things. But for me his performance was so funny and it was so deftly done. Given its time, I don't find anything offensive about it. I think, crucially, he wasn't trying to be offensive. He had already played an Indian character in The Millionairess with Sophia Loren and that was why I suggested their song title, Goodness Gracious Me, for our sketch show, because it's reclaiming it. It sounds more grand than it really was, but we were trying to suggest a changing of the guard. But again, I wasn't offended as a child and I'm not offended as an adult. I think it's of its time. You wouldn't do that now – you'd find a good Asian actor to play the part – but I always had an affection for him.
I think of the 10 years after The Ladykillers (1955) as peak Sellers, until Dr Strangelove (1964) – a work of genius. That period includes the first two Pink Panther films, The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964), which is, I think, my favourite Clouseau. His brilliance until then is to do with the precision of his performances in terms of character, of vocalising and comic timing. Maybe he was trying to prove himself – his Fred Kite in I'm All Right Jack is a performance without ego. Then he suddenly became a global star, and I think that status meant he became less precise in his performances – until we get to Being There which was him back to his best: a really precise, detailed performance.
There is a lot that has been written and said about Sellers and what always stuck with me was that his big fear was if you stripped away his characters you wouldn't find anything there. Blake Edwards said he had the best working times ever with him – and the worst. So I think that he was obviously a complicated person but when you look at it in terms of sheer talent, he was blessed. I don't think there's ever been a better comic actor.
Lesley-Anne Down
My father, like the rest of the country, absolutely adored The Goon Show, and I grew up listening to it. When I did The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, I was working with an icon – I mean, not even human, he was like a god. The first time I met him was in Munich. The publicist on the movie said Peter wants to have dinner with you, and I remember they were really tense about it. They said: don't do this, and don't say that, and, you know, just be a certain way. It was like going to meet the queen. It made me very tense as well, but within five minutes we just hit it off. Obviously I was a bit younger than he was, he was my dad's age, but we got on exceptionally well. And unlike any amount of men that I have worked with or come into contact with on both sides of the camera, he was a total gentleman for the entire shoot.
And it was a very long shoot. Today it would have taken about three weeks, but because it was Peter it was 14 weeks. He'd just be laughing and playing jokes and tricks all day long, sometimes we never actually got a shot completed. We hung out basically day and night for 14 weeks. The crew was huge. It must have cost a fortune but everyone was on board with it, it was like being at a comedy show. Everybody laughing, everybody having fun. I mean, it really was an amazing experience.
He didn't sleep very much, he liked to stay up all night and end up in the clubs. He loved [vocal ensemble] The Manhattan Transfer, which at the time was a great sound. He smoked a bit of dope, too. I don't think Peter really liked himself particularly, but a lot of comedians are that way. They're depressed and they cover it up with laughter. He was always searching for happiness, and people didn't take tremendous care of themselves back then. Nobody said, I've got to go to the gym or the treadmill; people just ate and drank what they wanted and did what they wanted.
I knew there was a side of Peter that could be difficult or disruptive. I had been told about it, but I don't remember any of that. I think there was one day that Peter and Blake [Edwards] were sitting in their chairs on set, and they were a little bit tense and not talking to each other. I don't know what that was about, I wasn't privy to it. But that was the only time that I ever saw anything. I didn't see Peter being cross or upset or nasty or anything. I only saw his funny, jolly, kind side. We got on like a house on fire. He was a genius. Seriously, what a career.
Christopher Guest
I met Peter Sellers once. The cast of Beyond the Fringe stayed with my family in New York, and I had the effrontery to ask Jonathan Miller if I could be his assistant. So I went to London and worked on his BBC film of Alice in Wonderland. We were doing some recording at Shepperton studios, and Sellers stopped by. It's hard to believe I did this, as I was 19, but I thought it was a good idea to start doing a voice that I thought he should hear. He didn't say anything: he just looked at me and nodded.
I had seen everything he'd done, heard most of what he'd done; he was a very important person for me in the beginning of my career. I guess I fancied that I could do the same thing, like doing different voices. You see, I can do a voice, but Sellers was embedded in those characters, and that commitment made it very different. Obviously he was funny, but he did something that no one else was doing.
His early films are fantastic, including the ones where he has smaller parts. Obviously the Kubrick stuff is surreal in many ways, he was given the freedom to do what he did. People just didn't work that way and when he did films for directors that knew enough to let him do that, the results were great. Blake Edwards is not a great comedy director but he was smart enough to let Sellers take off and do what he did.
This is a little embarrassing, but I remember when he had his first big heart attack in the 60s. I heard about it on the radio. I remember getting extremely upset and actually praying. I had never prayed in my life, and I haven't since. But I thought, please, to just whoever, I prayed that he would not die.
Geoffrey Rush
I remember seeing Tom Thumb when I was seven – a studio picture, but Sellers was still a Goon. At that stage, he hadn't decided to make a jump for film stardom. Because at the time, being a Goon was a privileged position. He had a 10-year contract, he and Spike were absurdists and were jazz guys. They put that into their comedy.
When I played him [in 2004's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers], I researched the role for the picture, and I found a copy of almost every Sellers film that existed. You can see the sense of adventure that he had with the early films: Carlton-Browne of the FO, I'm All Right Jack, The Mouse That Roared. I asked everyone if they'd met him. My publicist in the US was a young man who once had to go around to his house and shift some furniture. He said Sellers was very brusque and had no truck with some nobody from some agency. I found that quite interesting. I also met Marty Baum at [talent agency] CAA who handled a lot of Sellers' contracts in the 70s. Marty said: a lot of people thought Sellers was complicated, a mess and whatever, but I only ever saw an erudite, very polite, very articulate, very intelligent gentleman opposite me at my desk. These are the some of the mosaic bits that we put together to make a biographical film.
We wanted to take on the complexity of egomania, super talent, genius. Sellers would have been around so many buzzy, brilliant actors in his career, but unlike him they all didn't know how to define themselves. People often asked me how I related to him; and I would say: I went in every day and every day in front of the mirror I played somebody else. I think there would be some psychic wear and tear from that. There was something in his personality that was very self-regarding but I would imagine he could have been absolutely hilarious to be with. If he was on, it would have been like a raging bushfire.
And ultimately, when he gets to Being There (1979), that performance is as subtle as the greatest Chekhovian performance in a theatre. The thing I remember is his little round dark eyes being so childlike, his skin being so pink and papery from being hidden away from the world. I regard that as the work of a truly great performer.
Michael McKean
We had never heard of Peter Sellers in the US until a flurry in the early 60s. All of a sudden we had Tom Thumb, The Mouse That Roared, The Naked Truth, Two Way Stretch and I'm All Right Jack, which I didn't quite understand because, at 12, I wasn't a union member. He was just a brilliant actor and, of course, in The Mouse That Roared he played three really distinct characters. I found the whole thing thrilling.
And then I had a friend who said, 'Hey, have you ever heard of The Goon Show?' I think they were on WQXR and, my God, it was like a curtain had been drawn back. It was very well crafted anarchy and lunacy. And later he was so brilliant in Lolita and Dr Strangelove; there was a kind of an anarchic quality to what he was doing, but it was never out of control. It was being done by an artist, clearly, and not a clown. I was aware that a lot of the people who made me laugh or who thrilled me as actors were British; Alec Guinness, Stan Laurel and Boris Karloff. So anyway, I had my eyes wide open for good stuff, no matter who was purveying it.
I must have seen Dr Strangelove a dozen times and in one viewing I just concentrated on Sellers and watched the small work he was doing as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. What I love about his work is the little stuff. I didn't really hear about his private life until well afterwards. And still it is, to me, less interesting than his work. I remember reading Being There and then two years later seeing the film and I'm thinking: he gets this character better than the writer Jerzy Kosinski did. Sellers took this character and made his simplicity so complicated. I think that's what's so great about that performance. He was never a stick figure, and he was never just there for the comedy.
Paul Merton
I was slightly too young for The Goons when they were being broadcast, so the biggest impact on me was the 50th anniversary Last Goon Show of All in 1972, which was released as an LP. I was so knocked out by the sheer exuberance and the talent, and I used to listen to the records and practice until I could do the same impressions. I just loved the sort of films Sellers was in, things like I'm All Right Jack and The Wrong Arm of the Law, which is absolutely astonishing. So I became a bit of a Peter Sellers obsessive. My favourite film of his is one that's quite obscure, The Magic Christian, which is normally mentioned as 'other disappointments'. But what other film has both Michael Aspel and Roman Polanski in it?
The thing about Sellers is that he made more bad films than any other major star. You can look at his career in simplistic terms as being before the heart attack and after. He had the good fortune to be living half an hour from the planet's best heart hospital in Los Angeles, otherwise we would have been talking about him in the same breath as someone like James Dean. Graham Stark, who knew Sellers longer than most people, said that after the heart attack, he became a completely different person.
The string of films he made in Britain have all got merit, but things got awkward after he went to Hollywood. In the UK, he was a big fish in a small pond, and he could bend people to his will, but he couldn't do that in Hollywood. One of the reasons he never won an Oscar was that he just really upset people in the US. He was nominated for Dr Strangelove but he lost to Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady; what a kick in the teeth that must have been. He'd made so many enemies in Hollywood at that point. He wasn't kissing anybody's arse.
In the past three years, I've been watching his films in sequence, and Being There comes as like a great beacon of joy towards the end of a miserable run of movies. It shows that he hadn't lost his talent, he had just been in so many awful films. On Being There, he didn't have any arguments with anybody, he admired the director, Hal Ashby, there were no tantrums. It was clearly a film that he wanted to do and that one still stands up, particularly in the age of Trump, where somebody can be misunderstood as a potential presidential candidate.
Stephen Wight
Peter Sellers was a chameleon, one I learned a lot about playing his role in the original stage production of The Ladykillers. These days we associate physical transformation with huge weight loss or gain. Getting ripped for a role so our performer can be an action hero. Sellers saw physical transformation beyond the 'outer' and embodied his choices with wondrous results. Some were subtle, some were extreme, but always believable and real. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again there is this wonderful taut and uptight nature to Clouseau which creates a tension and fragility that provides such a glorious platform from the comedy to spring from or break into.
The juxtaposition of his arrogant, savoir faire vocal performance paired with the chaotic and clownish physicality of character is amazing. His mastery of 'playing it straight' yet just on the edge of complete absurdism is nothing short of genius. The scene in which he arrives at the house to interrogate the staff is theatrical farce at its best captured on film. Sellers is like a dancer waltzing between characters and objects, like a musician nailing every beat and flowing with the rhythm of it all. The scene crackles with a sense of everyone on the verge of corpsing. He was funny as hell and made it look effortless. Sellers achieved something every actor strives for but thinks probably doesn't exist … perfection.
A Peter Sellers season runs at the BFI Southbank, London, from 2-30 August, and Two Way Stretch and Heavens Above are released on 4 August on Blu-ray