The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)

Geoffrey Rush is phenomenal as every character played by Peter Sellers in his varied career. The sad story of a man who effectively lost his personality in the characters he assumed is brought to life and it was convincing. I remember feeling sad when Sellers died, but at the same time I saw in his final TV interview that he wasn't able to express who he was. This was evoked very well by this film. It is tragic in many ways but realistic. He was a comedy genius and films like Dr Strangelove could not have been made without him. Peter Sellers' early comedies are also well worth revisiting.I enjoyed the movie and I'm glad i made the effort to see it. All the cast were wonderful and looked like the people they were playing.

Not in the 2004 BFI Film Festival but on commercial release here in London, is a biopic, the subject of which is obvious, and which will undoubtedly arouse curiosity around the world. This biting "docu-drama" is directed by newcomer Stephen Hopkins and stars Australian Geoffrey Rush in the title role of a not very savoury Sellers. The picture has opened to "mixed reviews" - a nice way of saying that most local critics hate it, nor has it been a particularly strong box-office draw. Nevertheless, like it or not, this is a compelling study of the career of the major figure of late twentieth century screen comedy and, into the bargain, a searing dissection of his private life.It is always a bit hard to accept a fictionalised portrayal of a personality whose physical image is still so much alive in the collective film going consciousness. Sellers died a mere 24 years ago, but it seems like much less, since many of his pictures are still frequently revived - notably the "Pink Panther" series, "Dr. Strangelove" and Kubrick's "Lolita". Geoffrey Rush who, with horn rimmed glasses has a passable resemblance to Sellers, but more important, has the same jittery, openly schizophrenic personality, was without a doubt the right actor for the job and delivers a telling, if not exactly uncanny, portrayal. Devoted Sellers fans, of which there are many, may find the extremely unflattering revelations of his private life, especially the grisly manner in which he treated his family - wife (poor Emily Watson - she got a better deal in "Breaking The Waves"), children and mother - distasteful if not downright insulting. This may, in fact, account for the picture's relatively weak box-office performance so far. People just don't want to know that their favorite comedian was such a creep.The film, though star studded (John Lithgow as Blake Edwards, Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland, Christopher Fry as Sellers' spiritual adviser) has certain weaknesses - a tendency to telegraph some of its punches - but, overall it must go down as one of the more incisive studies in recent memory of the treatment of genius by the Hollywood establishment ~ and vice-versa. The point is made, over and over, that Sellers was in private life an empty shell of a man, which made him a horrible husband, disgusting father, and wimpy womaniser, but is precisely why he was so perfectly able to so fully inhabit the skins of the wild variety of characters he portrayed. One of many outstanding sequences in the film is when Sellers goes completely ga-ga over Sophia Loren during her visit to England in 1960 to do a film with him called "The Millionairess". Firmly convinced that he can win her away from her much older husband, Carlo Ponti, he flips and flops all over the place, finally making a complete ass of himself as she walks out on him in a secluded restaurant. The actress who plays Loren, Sonia Aquino, is even more busty, statuesque, and flourishing than the real Loren was, even at that time - m-mm - can't wait to see more of her! His successful courtship of Swedish beauty, Britt Ekland (via South African beauty, Theron) with the great line, "Hurry up and say 'yes' - I only have the band for another half hour" - is another high point of the film and also ends with a walkout and a divorce when his flimsy false-front machoism once again fails him. The real strong point of the film is the reconstruction of key scenes and characters from many of Sellers' landmark films: The hot-line sequence to the Kremlin in "Strangelove", various Clouseau extracts from the "Pink Panther" films, the famous Hindoo accent bit, and the representation of his tempestuous primadonna bickerings with famous directors such as Blake Edwards and Stanley Kubrick. One of the weak points of the film was the miscasting of a sombre John Cassavetes look- alike to portray the flamboyant Kubrick. This actor (Stanley Tucci) proclaims to the camera that the secret of direction is 'total control' - which Kubrick certainly exerted. The trouble is that Mr. Tucci appears to be more controlled than controlling. In fact, he seems to be playing in a different picture altogether. The only thing Stanley Tucci has in common with Stanley Kubrick is the first name. Lithgow, while emanating immense largesse, is less than convincing as a theoretically commanding Blake Edwards. One of the most painful scenes in the film is where Sellers ruthlessly denounces Edwards as a "totally no-talent director" before an enthusiastic crowd at the premiere of one of their most successful films. Talk about ingratitude ... I can scarcely imagine that the real Blake Edwards didn't tell him to just go F-himself on that occasion ...In any case, from the late fifties until his final film, "Being There", 1970, for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination, Peter Sellers was the most versatile, the most ubiquitous, and the most acclaimed screen comedian of his time - a true celebrity, if something of a schlemiel in his disastrous private life. Director Stephen Hopkins has captured an amazing amount of this and of real film history in a film of normal running time, which is, in itself, an accomplishment worthy of noteAlex, Muswell Hill, London, October 21, 2008

You want a comedian to be happy. It just goes with the territory. So it's a bit jarring to watch this bio-pic of comedian and movie star Peter Sellers. Sellers was very funny and gave life to some memorable characters (most notably, I suppose, Inspector Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove) but the portrait painted here of his personal life isn't filled with laughs at all. In fact, this film paints a picture of a troubled, emotionally immature and childish man with perhaps a bit of an Oedipus Complex (certainly dominated by his mother at the very least) who isn't able to make any other relationship (even with his own children) work successfully, and who gets overwhelmed by the characters he plays to the point at which he largely loses himself in the process. Sellers wants to break loose and set aside the disguises and become known as himself, but so successful was he with the various characters that he can't get the opportunity to do that. The film moves back and forth between fantasy and reality - and appropriately so, since that's the depiction of Sellers' own life, as he struggles to maintain a grip on reality - that struggle being shown most clearly when he imagines himself in a romance with Sophia Loren, only to have her reject him out of hand when he tries to turn his fantasy into reality. His marriages to his first wife Anne (Emily Watson) and his second wife Britt Eklund (Charlize Theron) are well portrayed, as is his troubled relationship with his children, and his working relationship with director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow.) The closing captions, which reveal that his soon to be divorced fourth wife ended up inheriting almost his entire multi-million dollar estate (because he died before the divorce was final) while his children got about $2000 US each were actually very sad.I thought this was a pretty convincing portrait. I've always thought Sellers was a good actor, although he was never at the top of my list of favourite actors. This is worth watching for those with an interest in the man's life, although it will certainly remove forever the image of a happy comedian.

Many film-star biopics suffer from the drawback of being bland and excessively reverential. "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", fortunately, is an exception, perhaps because it would be difficult to be excessively reverent about Peter Sellers, at least about Sellers the man rather than Sellers the actor. The film follows both his private life and his professional life from the 1950s, when he first came to prominence in as a comedian in the British radio programme "The Goon Show", to his death in 1980.Although he had acted in some of the best British comedies of the fifties (such as "The Ladykillers", "I'm All Right, Jack", and "The Mouse that Roared"), it was in the sixties that Sellers enjoyed his greatest international success, based largely on his ability to master a range of different accents and comic voices. Although he had major roles in Stanley Kubrick's two great films "Lolita" and "Dr Strangelove", most people today would associate his name with the Pink Panther series, in which he played the terminally incompetent French detective Inspector Clouseau. It is strange to think that Clouseau was originally only a minor character and that Sellers was only offered the part after Peter Ustinov turned it down. The original film was conceived as a vehicle for David Niven, but the sequels turned into Sellers vehicles when his performance greatly impressed director Blake Edwards.The seventies saw Sellers' career in decline; few of his films enjoyed any success, other than increasingly derivative "Pink Panther" sequels. He did, however, enjoy one final critical triumph for "Being There", based on a story by Jerzy Kosinski, which allowed him to show his skills as a dramatic as opposed to a comic actor and which earned him an Oscar nomination. This was his penultimate film and appeared a year before his death.One remark of Sellers that is given much prominence in the film was that his personality, the "real me behind the masks", had been "surgically removed". This idea may explain the importance of "Being There" for Sellers as the main character, Chance, with whom he identified, is a simpleton who is effectively a blank mask, a man who is seen by others as whatever they want him to be. Yet this idea of Sellers as a man without a personality of his own is not really borne out by the film. It might be more accurate to say that he was a man who looked at his personality, did not like what he saw, and wished that it had been surgically removed.The film shows Sellers as a childish, petulant man, much given to tantrums and emotionally over-dependent on his possessive mother Peg. He also relied heavily on the advice of a clairvoyant named Maurice Woodruff, here portrayed by Stephen Fry as something of a charlatan. He seems to have had difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality, remaining in character as Clouseau or Strangelove even when off screen. His marriage to his long-suffering first wife Anne Howe seems to have broken down when he "confessed" to an affair with Sophia Loren (his co-star in "The Millionairess") which never existed outside his imagination. His second marriage to the beautiful Swedish actress Britt Ekland seems to have been happy at first, but quickly deteriorated and ended in domestic violence. According to the film, the cause of the rupture was that she wanted children and he did not, as his relationship with the children of his first marriage was always a difficult one.Rather surprisingly, the film omits details of Sellers' two subsequent marriages, although I would have thought that his final marriage to Lynne Frederick would have provided the film-makers with plenty of material. Frederick, who was much younger than her husband, was often depicted in the media as a greedy, hypocritical gold-digger, a characterisation which might have fitted well with the film's view of Sellers as a self-deluding fantasist.The film's main strength is the performance from Geoffrey Rush in the title role. Although there is little physical resemblance between the two men, and although, at 53, Rush was considerably older than the character he was playing except for the final scenes, he is incredibly convincing. At times it almost seems as though the real Peter Sellers has been brought back to life. Although Rush is perhaps best known as the fictional pirate captain in "Pirates of the Caribbean", he seems to be at his best playing real-life individuals; he was also very good as Walsingham in the two "Elizabeth" films and brilliant as David Helfgott in "Shine". Most of the other roles are little more than cameos, but one exception is the fine contribution from Emily Watson as Anne Howe.I would not rate this film quite as highly as the deeply moving "Shine"; Peter Sellers was such a difficult, self-destructive character that, however good Rush is, one is never really moved by what happens to him. Nevertheless, this is a fine biography of a man who, whatever his faults, was at his best a very fine actor. 8/10