Behind the clumsy genius of Inspector Clouseau lived a tortured man, shipwrecked by himself. Exactly 40 years ago the heart of the greatest comedian after Chaplin burst.
“Like all comedians, I'm only funny when I'm working,” he once said. And everyone celebrated the event as if it were a joke. In reality, there was no way not to believe him: it was said by Peter Sellers, a brilliant actor and comedian, the greatest after Charles Chaplin. A genius of improvisation, satire, artifice, and parody who two weeks after coming into this world was already making his debut at the Kings Theater in Southsea, London. His parents were actors and they had brought him on stage with them. Bad idea: When the curtain fell and thunderous applause was heard, the baby went into such a panic that no one could stop him from crying for hours.
Living a childhood of perpetual touring and no established address, he had developed mixed feelings about the show. While his mother encouraged him to expand his innate qualities, his father seriously doubted those abilities, suggesting that his son's talents were enough to become a sweeper. Furthermore, he had to choose between his father's Catholic faith or his mother's Judaism — "the Jews choose her mother's faith," she repeated to him. In the end, the young Peter Sellers would end up developing a strange love for the occult, mediums, and spiritualist sessions. He followed all the 'New age' fashions. He even handed over the governance of his life to Maurice Woodruff, his astrologer.
In fact, Peter Sellers did not go to the set if his horoscope told him unfavorable things. “He was crazy, certified crazy,” said Blake Edwards, his director in the entire “Pink Panther” saga. “He used to talk to his dead mother and he carried a portable shrine wherever he went. He would also call me at all hours of the night to tell me not to worry about the scene we were going to shoot the next day because God had told him how he should act. And when it came time to film, Sellers was completely unprepared. We had to delete the part of him and replace it with a double. More than once I had to tell him that in the future, tell God to stay away from show business.”
His biographers say that until he was 16 he slept in the same bed as his mother Peg, while his dad Bill spent the night on the couch. That the rest of his life was spent searching for an identity. That would explain his desire to surround himself with beautiful women, collect sports cars, yachts, mansions in which he would never live, and a permanent suite at The Dorchester, the five-star favorite of sheiks and monarchs. Self-destructive and violent, the shockwave of his outbursts devastated what was closest to him first: he beat his wife, Britt Ekland broke up her four marriages, and showered his children with as many gifts as threats. of death.
“He was like a bully on the playground. "He liked to make you cry until his victim started to collapse," his son Michael said before he died of a heart attack in 2006. For Jonathan Miller, who directed Sellers in a television version of "Alice in Wonderland", “it was completely empty when not acting, it was a receptacle instead of a person.” For Sam Wasson, Edwards' biographer, “he was a child and a tyrant, he hated himself. He was mercurial: he seduced you and then expelled you.” Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in two films, was fierce: “There is no such person.” And when a journalist asked Peter Sellers who the real Peter Sellers was, like a two-week-old child terrified by the roar of the theater he broke down again and said through tears: “I really don't know.”
He was a brilliant jazz drummer who, at the age of 16, had already recorded two LPs produced by George Martin of the Beatles. He recorded one more with Sophia Loren. He doubled for Humphrey Bogart when he had an accident. A friend of George Harrison and Ringo Starr, in 1965 did a comic version of “A Hard Day's Night” reciting it as Shakespeare's Richard III. Furthermore, he was the owner of a gem: during the recording of the “White Album”, Ringo had given him a tape with the first mixes. But he was also the one who refused to film if someone was wearing green. Or purple, “it's the color of death,” he said. He also did not enter hotel rooms painted in those colors. His idol was Stan Laurel.
Astonishingly versatile and talented, he would be the great English comedy star of the 1950s. He would take over the world for the next two decades thanks to “Lolita” and “Dr. Strangelove” by Stanley Kubrick, but above all for the hilarious five-film saga of “The Pink Panther” that started a ten-film franchise that has already earned more than a billion dollars and belongs to the cultural memory of the planet. Watching Sellers' performative brilliance, and his perfect gags, one imagines that this was the funniest set ever. Big mistake: he took so many pills that his explosions of rage ended up overshadowing the iconic and clumsy Inspector Clouseau.
