Peter Sellers, CBE (born Richard Henry Sellers; 8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980) was an English film actor, comedian and singer. He performed in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show, featured on a number of hit comic songs and became known to a worldwide audience through his many film characterisations, among them Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series of films.
Born in Portsmouth, Sellers made his stage debut at the Kings Theatre, Southsea, when he was two weeks old. He began accompanying his parents in a variety act that toured the provincial theatres. He first 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, which toured Britain and the Far East. After the war, Sellers made his radio debut in ShowTime, and eventually became a regular performer on various BBC radio shows. |
The Goons (Spike Milligan; Sir Harry Donald Secombe; Peter Sellers; Michael Bentine) with Ray Ellington and his band 1952 |
During the early 1950s, Sellers, along with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, took part in the successful radio series The Goon Show, which ended in 1960. Emerging as the star of the series with his repertoire of eccentric characters, Sellers also dominated the Goons’ film projects, including the short subject Let’s Go Crazy (1951) and the feature-length Down Among the Z Men (1952).
On his own, he played a handful of supporting film roles before his breakthrough appearance as a doltish crook in The Ladykillers (1955). Following the advice of that film’s star, Alec Guinness, Sellers strove to avoid playing the same character twice. He especially enjoyed disappearing into characters much older than himself (The Smallest Show on Earth, 1957; Battle of the Sexes, 1959) and playing multiple roles (The Mouse That Roared, 1959).
Peter Sellers did some of his best work for the Boulting Brothers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, notably his characterization of obstreperous union shop steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack (1959); it was also during this period that he made his feature directorial debut with Mr. Topaze (1961). Many British observers of the period dismissed Sellers as a glorified radio mimic, while Americans lauded him as a genius. One such American was director Stanley Kubrick, who cast Sellers as the treacherous Clare Quilty in Lolita (1962) and in three superbly defined roles in the brilliant “doomsday comedy” Dr. Strangelove (1964). The role that earned him superstar status was the magnificently inept Inspector
The World of Henry Orient (1964) was the first "American" movie that Sellers made and was the official U.S. entry in the Cannes Film Festival. He played a vain and lecherous pianist being chased by two teenagers. But his visit to Hollywood was cut short: he had divorced his first wife, Anne Howe, and married 19-year old Britt Ekland, a rising Swedish film star, in February 1964; and he had the first of his heart attacks in April at the age of 38.
Upon his recovery, the quality of his films became wildly erratic, his mercurial offscreen temperament reflected by the unevenness of his cinematic output. He would not truly hit his stride again until the mid-1970s, when he repeated the role of Inspector Clouseau in three profitable Pink Panther sequels.
In 1979 he delivered what many consider his finest performance, as the simpleminded gardener Chance in Being There. This Oscar-nominated triumph was followed by one of his worst films, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980). Suffering a series of heart attacks his final “performance” in Trail of the Pink Panther (released posthumously in 1982) was a hodgepodge of outtakes from earlier films.
On 21 July 1980 Sellers arrived in London from Geneva. He checked into the Dorchester hotel, before visiting Golders Green Crematorium for the first time to see the location of his parents' ashes. He had plans to attend a reunion dinner with his Goon Show partners Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, scheduled for the evening of 22 July. On the day of the dinner, Sellers took lunch in his hotel suite and shortly afterwards collapsed from a heart attack. He was taken to the Middlesex Hospital, London, and died just after midnight on 24 July 1980, aged 54. Sellers had a script for a revival, called The Romance of the Pink Panther, in his possession at the Dorchester Hotel on the day of his death.
Peter Sellers was married four times: to Anne Howe (1951-1964), an English actress with whom he had two children, Michael and Sarah; to Britt Ekland (1964-1969), a Swedish actress with whom he had a daughter, Victoria; to Miranda Quarry (1970-1974), a stepdaughter of an English peer; and to Lynne Frederick, an actress whom he married in 1977 (She turned 26 the day after Sellers died). He fell in and out of love with unexpected impetus: he surprised even himself. Sellers himself said: I seem to marry young people. I never grew up, you see—I'm still the same idiot I was at 18 or 20."(Edited mainly from Wikipedia & Your Dictionary)