by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night (Friday, April; 21) shortly after 9 my husband Charles and I watched a movie that premiered on HBO Films in 2004,which probably explains why I’d never heard of it and most likely he hadn’t either: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a 2004 biopic of the great British comedian and actor – played, in a bit of casting that at first seemed strange but ultimately worked brilliantly, by Geoffrey Rush. Before watching this movie I’;d never thought of Rush as a comedian, having known himmostly for his breakthrough role in the 1996 film Shine, in which he plaed real-life Australian classical pianist David Helfgott, who had a demanding father who pushed him to a concert career and had to battle his way back from mental illness to be able to play again. Oddly, though Peter Sellers was a superstar while Devid Hellfgott was never more than a footnote in classical music history, the two characters have strong similarities. Peter Sellers was pushed into acting by a domineering parent – his mother former music-hall performer Peg (Miriam Margolyes), not hs more easygoing father Bill (William Vaughan). When the film, imaginatively directed by Stephen Hopkins from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (based on a book by Righte Lewis that I presume was just a “straight’ biography), opens Sellers is a major star on BBC Radio with The Goon Show, starring him in a comedy trio with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe that were basically Monty Python before Monty Python.
But his mom is pushing him to go after roles in feature films because that’s where the long-term stardom and money are. He reads for a part as an aging World War I veteran and is rudely told by the casting director that, no matter how good his voice is, film is a visual medium and he’s just too young for the part. So Sellers shows up again in age makeup and fakes a trick knee, because the character is supposed to have been permanently wounded in combat. The next thing we see, Sellers is already a movie star in Britain, winner of the British Film Academy award for Best Actor (for which he beats out Laurence Olivier and Daid Niven), only he’s also a holy terror to live with. We see him in a frightening scene in which, when his son mistakenly messes up the expensive sports car Sellers has just bought, he retaliates by destroying his son’s prized slot race cars and track. The boy’s mother, Sellers’ first wife Anne (Emily Watson), uts up with him until he announces that he wants to have an affair with his co-star, Sophia Loren. Just about every male who co-starred with Loren hit on her, and Sellers was no exception. She dealt with them the same way – by playing along with it as long as she dared and then flaunting her husband, Italian film producer Carlo Ponti, in their faces.(My mom always admired Loren for staying with this sport, fat, dumpy-looking guy when she could have had her pick of the world’s straight men.)
Sellers gets his big break when he is offered supporting role as French police inspector Jcques Cloueau by director Blake Edwards in the 1964 film
Ironically, Sellers had made a previous film, The Mouse That Roared, also a black comedy about the threat of nuclear war and also a film in which Sellers played multiple roles, and also financed by Columbia, but the only references to it here are a brief shot of the poster and an appearance of Sellers in drag as the aging Duchess of Grand Fenwick in a hallucinatory sequence in which various characters he’s played flash befa few months later, while Sellers was making the film Kiss Me, Stupid for director Billy Wilder, in which he was cast as a desperate songwriter eager to place a song with Dean Martin (essentially playing himself) and willing to accept to Martin’s demand for a night with his wife in exchange for plugging his song. Only the songwriter, Orville, hires a prostitute (Kim Novak) to pose as the wife (played by Felicia Farr, real-life wife of frequent Wilder collaborator Jack Lemmon) – but through a mixup the real wife ends up in bed with the singer. Sellers lasted a few weeks on the production and then had a severe heart attack which nearly killed him and wh ich he blamed in the intense sex he’d been having with his new girlfriend, Swedish actress Britt Eklund (Charlize Theron), who soon becomes his second wife. Alas, she quickly becomes pregnant from all that intense sex and Sellers, who already has two kids from his first marriage, doesn’t wnat another. He not-s-ogently hints that she should have an abortion, and she refuses – which heads to a grimly funny scene of them together on the film After the Fox (a pretty stupid mid-1960’s comic caper film directed by Italian neo-realist master Vittorio De Sica,wh ose presence there practically defined “overqualified”) in which the sound of their baby crying keeps wrecking take after take. Eventually Eklund breaks up with Sellers after a scene in which he knocks her down and she retaliates by breaking a framed photo of his late mother over his head.
The rest of the movie is the familiar rags-to-riches-to-not-quite-rags-again tale as Sellers ends up broke from his indulgences with women and drugs (ther’es a scene in a limo of him snorting cocaine with two babes in the back seat with him, and a rather strange deleted scene which appears to be director Jp[lins debating with himself whether he should leave that scene in or take it out, or leave it in but digitally erase the women and the drugs) and his battle with his agents over whether he should do another Pink Panther movie or a pet project of his own, a film of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There. Sellers was attracted to Being There because he saw himself as a blank slate on which people wrote whatever they wanted, and the whole conceit of this movie – that there was no ineradicable “me” to Peter Sellers, no definable persona aside from the roles he played –led him to want to play Kosinski’s unbelievably naïve gardener who has grown to adulthood and only then is confronted by the normal world,
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is a really well-done film in its way, but it’s yet another celebrity biopic that leaves you to wonder whether all talented people are also total assholes. It’s mostly told chronologically, though there are a few scenes in which characters in Peter Sellers' life (his dad early on, his mom on her deathbed – in which she says she perfectly understands why he can’t see her one last time because he’s in themiddle of shooting a film – and Stanley Kubrick) talk to us, the audience, on their experiences of living, raising and/or working with him. Ironically, one of the films on my list of potentially great movies that weren’t made but should have been is a biography of Charlie Chaplin starring Peter Sellers, made right after Chaplin published his autobiography in 1965. Peter Sellers was a brilliant performer and hsi films brought joy to millions (and are still doing so!),but he must have been a real handful to work with or even just to know casually. And, despite the film’s title, it really doesn’t depict Sellers’ death; he makes Being There and thn a closing credit roll tells us that Sellers made just one more movie (a Fu Manchu spoof that died ignominiously at the box office); he was in the process of divorcing his fourth wife,Lynne Frederick, but hadn’t completed the paperwork when he died (there’s a bit of that deleted scene in which Hopkins debates whether or not to include Sellers’ third wife, Miranda Quarry, and ultimately decides not to), so she inherited his multi-million dollar legacy and Sellers palmed off his children with just $2,000 each.
