One of the greatest comedians of all time: Who is Peter Sellers?

Peter Sellers was born in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, in 1925, the second child of a pianist father and an actress mother. His real name was Richard Henry, but his family always called him Peter, the name they gave to their previous child, whom they lost in infancy, and he was known by this name throughout his life.

Sellers, whose father was a Protestant and his mother a Jew, attended the Catholic school St Aloysius College, where he discovered that he was a Jew and not an enigma about faith.

He started working in a theater as a janitor at the age of 15. He also started acting and singing in the theater, where he eventually became a light operator. He became a drummer in the band Joe Daniels and His Hot Shots. He volunteered during World War II and went to India and Myanmar as an airman in the Royal Air Force. When he returned to England after the end of the war in 1945, he pursued work and started performing stand-up shows in music halls.

After short films, he starred in his first feature film, the black-and-white comedy "Penny Points to Paradise", in 1951. That same year, he began the groundbreaking BBC radio comedy "The Goon Show" with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine, where they became a legendary team. He continued this legendary program, which would deeply influence later British comedies, from Monty Python to Mr. Bean, until 1960.

His big breakthrough came with his role as dogmatic union man Fred Kite in John Boulting's BAFTA Award-winning comedy "I'm All Right Jack" (1959). His superior comedy talent took him to leading roles in many films in the 60s.

Peter Sellers (born Richard Henry Sellers; 8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980) was an English actor and comedian. He first came to prominence performing in the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers featured on a number of hit comic songs, and became known to a worldwide audience through his many film roles, among them Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series.

In 1962, he also proved his flair for drama with his role as the mentally unstable and multiple personality Clare Quilty in Stanley Kubrick's Nobakov adaptation "Lolita" (1962). This surprising performance propelled him into Kubrick's next film, "Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," and earned him his first Oscar nomination. Thus, Sellers became the first actor in Academy Awards history to portray more than one character in the same film and be nominated in a single category.

Together with Blake Edwards, the director with whom he fought the most and worked with just as often in his career, they shot "The Pink Panther" in 1963 and started one of the most entertaining series in the history of cinema. The role of the clumsy and well-intentioned French Inspector Jacques Clouseau, who was originally designed as a side character, was so loved that the series became known with this character and his name. The second of the film, which resonated all over the world, came a year after the delay. "A Shot in the Dark" (1964) starred Clouseau and Sellers, and the film became the most popular of the series.

In a world where everything British was popular in the 1960s with the Beatles, and James Bond movies, all eyes were looking to Sellers for comedy. At the peak of his career in 1964, drugs caused him to suffer a near-fatal heart attack. When he came to, he said he saw “Heaven” and met an angel who told him it was not yet time to die.

He was working on Billy Wilder's "Kiss Me, Stupid" (1964) when this first crisis came. In a move he would later regret, Wilder replaced Sellers with Ray Walston instead of stopping the project. The actor recovered completely after a short time and returned to the sets.

Although "What's New Pussycat", in which he starred in 1965, was a great success, it was becoming increasingly difficult to work with Sellers. In 1968, he refused to star in "Inspector Clouseau" (1968), directed by Bud Yorkin and was very angry when Alan Arkin was cast instead. Ongoing disputes with the production company also increased; So much so that, although the Bond movie "Casino Royale" (1967), in which he played the role of Evelyn Tremble, broke box office records, the blame for the cost was placed on Sellers.

They reunited with Blake Edwards, from whom they had a quarrelsome breakup, saying "I will never work again", in 1968 for "The Party", their first and only film without the "Pink Panther". This unique comedy, almost entirely improvised, proved to the world how limitless Sellers' talent is.

By 1970, Sellers' career was in serious decline and he began acting in trivial comedies and appearing more frequently on television. Inspector Clouseau came to his aid, and "The Return of the Pink Panther" (1975), which he also shot with Blake Edwards, was a big box office hit in a year when "Jaws" was a hit. This sequel, which came 11 years later, was the return of both the Blake Edwards – Peter Sellers – Henry Mancini partnership and the Pink Panther cartoon hero and the Pink Panther diamond. Then came the most fantastic of the Pink Panther films, "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" (1976) and "Revenge of the Pink Panther" (1978).

Particularly in the mid-1970s, his physical and mental health increasingly deteriorated, with ongoing alcohol and drug problems. The actor's behavior on the set became more uncontrolled and compulsive, and he began to clash frequently with directors and other actors. He never fully recovered from the stroke he suffered in 1964 because he stopped taking his heart medications. He barely survived another major crisis in March 1977, and the pacemaker implanted to regulate his heartbeat caused him further mental and physical discomfort. But he always refused to slow down his work schedule or undergo heart surgery that could extend his life by several years.

He was also a difficult, domineering, and jealous man in his private life, he was married four times and in an interview, he said about himself: "If I can't find a way to live with myself, I shouldn't expect someone else to live with me." Speaking about their troubled marriage in the BBC Arts documentary "Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy", his second marriage, actor Britt Ekland, said that Sellers was extremely controlling and mentally unstable: "Obviously he suffered from bipolar or was severely bipolar. He was a very suffering soul who needed to get more help. On the contrary, he was too helpless to get help because it was such a valuable acquisition.”

He realized his biggest dream project in 1979 and starred in "Being There", adapted from the novel of Jerzy Kosinski, of whom he was a big fan. The film, directed by Hal Ashby and seven years in the making, earned Sellers his second Oscar nomination.

While he was preparing to star in "Romance of the Pink Panther" in 1980, he was also making plans to revive "The Goon Show". However, on July 22, he suffered a massive heart attack in his hotel room was hospitalized, and remained in a coma for more than 30 hours. Sellers never regained consciousness after being admitted to the hospital, and although he did not suffer a cardiac arrest, his heartbeat literally “disappeared” in his last two hours, one of his doctors said. He died in his hospital bed just after midnight on July 24, 1980, at the age of 54.

Blake Edwards' attempts to revive The Pink Panther after Sellers' death resulted in two films in the 1980s. "Trail of the Pink Panther" (1982), which Edwards dedicated to him with the text "To Peter Sellers, the one and only Inspector Clouseau...", was completed with scenes that were not used in the previous Pink Panther film. Edwards' efforts to make a 'Pink Panther' without Sellers continued with disappointing films such as "Curse of the Pink Panther" (1983) and "Son of the Pink Panther" (1993).

In 1996, two lost short films, "Dearth of a Salesman" and "Insomnia is Good For You" starring Peter Sellers, were found in the garbage container in front of the door of the Park Lane Films company. These 30-minute short comedy films, made in 1957, were first shown at the Southend Film Festival in 2013.

His controversial life was the subject of documentary films such as “The Unknown Peter Sellers” (2000), “Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers” (2001), “There Used to Be a Me” (2021) and “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” (2018).

The actor was played by Geoffrey Rush in the movie "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", which was shot for television in 2004. The film, which won the Golden Globe and Emmy awards, was adapted from the book of the same name, which consists of interviews with Roger Lewis' Sellers family members.