‘A genius but very difficult’: The strange legacy of Peter Sellers

A new documentary about the star of ‘Dr Strangelove’ and the Pink Panther franchise shows that brilliance and neurosis always went hand in hand, says Geoffrey Macnab

An inspector calls: Sellers in ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again’ (1976), one of his six outings as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Rex)

It’s 40 years now since Peter Sellers died of a heart attack aged only 54. His body was cremated in Golders Green crematorium on 26 July 1980. At his thanksgiving service in St Martin’s-in-the-Fields two months later, his fellow film star David Niven gave the eulogy, talking to the mourners about the many barbed obituaries for the star of Dr Strangelove and half a dozen Pink Panther outings.

“Peter Sellers was expensive, difficult, ungracious, despotic, a man who would fire directors and turn scripts upside down, bitter, depressed, lonely, in a constant state of turmoil, vexatious, quarrelsome, distrustful, self-destructive and arrogant,” Niven said as he summed up what the press had written. You might have expected Niven at this point to have dismissed this all as Fleet Street bias and bile. Instead, he acknowledged “Peter was some of these things some of the time.”

Niven added his own observation. “People outside our profession have no conception of the blind fear an actor has of being a failure in public.”

The address summed up the utter paradox of Sellers. The comic genius who gave so much pleasure to filmgoers had often inflicted misery on those closest to him. The pressure to prove himself again and again reduced him to despair. Everybody knew he was “impossible” and yet they all cherished his genius and loved him anyway. Hollywood stars, British aristocrats, end-of-the-pier comedians, game show presenters and actors from sitcoms like Dad’s Army all crammed into the church to pay tribute to him.

Later this year, a documentary about the making of one of Sellers’ most ill-starred movies is released in the US. The Ghost of Peter Sellers is about the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a rip-roaring pirate movie co-written and co-starring Spike Milligan, which was shot in Cyprus in 1973 but never released. The documentary is made by the Hungarian-born Peter Medak, the filmmaker who directed Ghost in the Noonday Sun.

Sellers as Dr Strangelove, one of three characters he played in the 1964 comedy

On one level, the documentary is an act of extreme masochism on Medak’s behalf. The original movie was a disaster for him personally and professionally. At the time he shot it, Medak was considered one of the brightest new talents in the British film industry thanks to his first three features, Negatives (1968) starring Glenda Jackson, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972) starring Alan Bates, and The Ruling Class (1972), starring Peter O’Toole. After his brush with Sellers, Medak didn’t make another film for five years. His reputation was very badly tarnished.

Feelings are still very raw. In the documentary, Medak has an uncomfortable reunion with the producer and financier John Heyman (father of producer David Heyman of Harry Potter fame). Over 40 years ago, Heyman very nearly sacked Medak, seemingly holding him entirely responsible for the disaster that was then unfolding with the film.

“We all were to blame. None of us should have made this picture. It’s not as if we didn’t know that Peter was nuts. The truth of the matter is none of us knew how nuts,” Heyman concedes in the documentary.

Sellers utterly sabotaged the movie. He alienated his fellow actors. His general timekeeping was so erratic that it makes Marilyn Monroe at her most wayward look like a model of punctuality by comparison. At one stage, Sellers faked a heart attack so he could get away from the production. He was flown back to London and Medak was surprised to see a photograph of him in the newspaper the next day, not in intensive care, but having dinner with Princess Margaret at his favourite restaurant, San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge.

Medak realised the project was going to turn out badly almost from the outset. He also knew that if he quit, he would be held responsible anyway – and so he stayed on. His wife was pregnant and he needed the money. The original producers were fired, seemingly at Sellers’ behest, days into production. Sellers, who had just split up with Liza Minnelli, turned up on set in a morbid depression. Medak complained that he hadn’t even read “the bloody script”.

This is one of those documentaries that show just how badly a film can go wrong. It was made for one simple reason, namely that the financing was available thanks to Sellers’ drawing power at the box office. The script was as leaky as the boat on which much of the action was set, and which sunk before shooting had even begun. The film hadn’t been properly prepared. The Cypriot cast were in open mutiny. Sellers behaved abominably throughout. We soon realise, though, that he was just as much a victim as the director and crew he treated so badly. This ranks with his least successful movies. It also reminds us why his reputation endures. With Sellers, brilliance and neurosis always went hand in hand.

Medak’s attitude towards the star is ambivalent in the extreme. “For 43 years, I covered up this very dark spot in my life,” the director comments on screen of his own film, which distributors Columbia refused to release. However, when I spoke to him this week, Medak insisted that if he had had the chance to reshoot the film with Sellers and Milligan, he would have done so in an instant.

“He [Sellers] was a genius, no question about it, but he was very difficult, often unreasonably so, and with no logic behind it,” the director says. He likens Sellers and Milligan to two troublemaking identical twins. “When things started to go wrong on the film, everybody blamed me, the director, but I was trying to cope with two lunatics at loose.”

Milligan was crazy but ultimately well-intentioned. Sellers had “a very nasty streak in him. He could turn on people in a second and be absolutely impossible.”

Sellers was intensely competitive. Medak’s documentary tells the tragicomic story of how the actor fell out with his friend and fellow actor Anthony Franciosa during production, refusing even to appear in the same shot. If somebody stood in his way, Medak tells me, Sellers would be “absolutely ruthless”.

Sellers in Peter Medak’s ‘The Ghost of the Noonday Sun’ in 1973 (Rex) (Rex Features)

The malice notwithstanding, Medak’s enduring affection for Sellers is self-evident. They were friends before the production began, having been introduced by Michael Caine. They met again for a final time many years later, when Medak was working on an adjoining stage to where Sellers was shooting a new Pink Panther movie. Sellers summoned him to visit. Medak didn’t go. “I was so hurt and upset. I was wrongly accused and made responsible for the failure of the film when it had much more to do with Peter than me,” he explains about his refusal to meet Sellers.

In the end, the star came to see him instead, dressed in full Inspector Clouseau outfit. He greeted Medak effusively, seemingly having forgotten all about the agonies he caused the director. “Darling, it was us against them,” Sellers told Medak, as if they were the lone rebels taking on the big, bad Hollywood system. Medak knew this was utter rubbish. Sellers was the face of that system. He had had all the power and none of the responsibility. Nonetheless, there were no bad feelings. The director and the star who had destroyed his movie went off and got drunk together.

Socially, Sellers was “amazing, incredible, very funny”. On set, though, he was very different. He would fret about everything. At one stage midway through Ghost in the Noonday Sun, he came to Medak to say that his character’s name, Dick Scratcher, needed to be changed because “scratch” was Irish slang for the devil. The fact that the name “Scratcher” was on every script, call sheet and press release – and that they had already shot half the film – didn’t bother Sellers.

Medak’s experiences with Sellers were far from unique. It was a minor consolation to learn later that Blake Edwards endured many of the same problems. The difference, of course, was that Edwards’ Pink Panther movies made millions at the box office. When the profits were so enormous, Sellers’s idiosyncrasies were far easier to tolerate.

Ask Medak to pinpoint what made Sellers so special and he talks of “the incredible nuance” the comedian found in every performance he gave. “He was amazingly, incredibly, funny.” The brilliance lay in the accumulation of tiny details; the way the wheelchair-bound Dr Strangelove’s arm would twitch into the beginnings of a Nazi salute in Dr Strangelove (1964) or the fussy, self-important fidgeting of the union official Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack (1959). Sellers was an inspired observer who built performances out of his characters’ accents and mannerisms.

“There was a madness to it,” Medak suggests. “To be at that high intensity of humour, you leave the bounds of reality and you enter into a superhuman kind of zone where you are performing.”

In the documentary, Medak includes archive footage of Sellers addressing his reputation for being so difficult to work with. The comedian defends himself by saying he “just can’t take mediocrity on any level … if you take it, you sink”.

His performance in ‘Being There’ (1979) won him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination (Rex) (Rex Features)

In his determination to escape mediocrity, Sellers left chaos and destruction in his wake. Ironically, he ended up making a lot of mediocre films anyway.

Judging by the clips included in the documentary, Ghost in the Noonday Sun was no worse than many of the other movies Sellers was busy churning out in the 1970s. It’s a broad, buccaneering farce full of scenes of Sellers and Milligan running amok and pulling funny faces. If the film had been properly released, it would almost certainly have found an audience.

Sellers never seemed touched by the failures with which he was involved. Audiences always stayed loyal to him. Right at the end of his career, he gave one of his greatest and most moving performances as the gardener, Chance, the holy innocent who inadvertently becomes a Washington DC power broker, in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). This was Sellers in eerily gentle and restrained groove. His performance won him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. It proved he was the same formidable comic force at the end of his life as he had been when he was starting out on The Goon Show. There had been no weakening in his powers.

Forty years after his death, Sellers’ once-enormous tabloid celebrity has inevitably long since withered. His name means little to younger cinemagoers. “The trouble is that the younger audience’s memory goes back 10 years. When you ask people, ‘do you know who Peter Sellers was?’ they are completely blank,” Medak reflects. Nonetheless, tell them “he’s the guy in the Pink Panther movies” and there will usually be a flicker of recognition. When you see Sellers on screen in Medak’s documentary, a film that shows him at his worst, traces of his comic genius still burst through.

‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ is released on VoD in the US on 23 June. ‘Peter Sellers: State of Comic Ecstasy’ is available now on BBC iPlayer