The Prime Minister of Mirth

By Stefan Kanfer

Peter Sellers (1925-1980)

From the wings, the vaudeville comedian strode onstage, cradling a three-week-old baby. "I may have in my arms," he told his audience, "the future Prime Minister of Mirth."

For the next 54 years after that carry-on part, Peter Sellers strove for the role. When he died of a heart attack last week in London, he was still officially untitled, but he had more than earned his royal mirthright. In a career that spanned four decades, Sellers played a German scientist, an R.A.F. officer and the President of the U.S. in Dr. Strangelove; a Cockney Marxist in I'm All Right, Jack; an Indian doctor in The Millionairess; a French detective in A Shot in the Dark; a dowager and her friends in The Mouse That Roared. He impersonated celebrities as varied as James Bond and Queen Victoria, and when literary conceits seemed impossible to translate to film, Sellers easily became Quilty, the litterateur of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and the simple-minded Chance of Being There.

The Great Impersonator used unique methods for his special effects. The voice of bumbling Inspector Clouseau is swiped from a Paris hotel concierge; in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, a film that will be released next week, Sellers imitates the uncle of his friend Lord Snowdon. Aurally acute listeners to Chance may recognize the voice of Comedian Stan Laurel. Although he was unmusical offscreen, he could become an opera star if the part required it. "Peter couldn't sing a bloody note," recalled Actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. "Yet when he sang Caruso, he took high Cs like Caruso." Throughout his career, Sellers stole or copied mannerisms of people he came across. First, he said, "I work on the voice. Perhaps this comes from my radio days. After that I establish how the character walks. And then suddenly something strange happens. The person takes over. I stare at my own image in the mirror waiting for the other fellow, the man I'm going to portray, to emerge--to stare back at me. And then it happens. I have the feeling that the film character enters my body as if I were a kind of medium. It's a little frightening."

It is small wonder that his biography is subtitled The Mask Behind the Mask. But after the final disguise there was a man of enormous gifts and conflicts. Although he was third-generation show business--both parents and a grandparent were music hall entertainers --Sellers preferred to recall that his ancestry included Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and 18th century British Boxing Champion Daniel Mendoza. The boy dreamed of a career in journalism, "the Spanish Civil War covered exclusively by Peter Sellers," but in adolescence he was claimed by comedy. In the R.A.F. he amused airmen by imitating a series of officers and enlisted men. When he applied for a job at the BBC, he took the precaution of getting two radio stars to recommend him by phone. The voices of both actors were played by Peter Sellers. At the BBC he found colleagues who gave lunacy a good name. On radio and film, the members of the Goon Show climbed Mount Everest from the inside, scrubbed a field with soap and took a phonograph needle in hand and ran circles around the record for low fidelity.

Sellers' gift for mimicry gave him a start in movies, but by 1959 others were imitating him. After eight nondescript films, he became a star with I'm All Right, Jack. Suddenly there were more roles than anyone could reasonably handle -- so he accepted them all. By the mid-'60s Hollywood had a standard one-liner: "The picture they said could never be made -- it doesn't have Peter Sellers in it." Off-screen he was equally frantic; he changed residences almost as often as clothes, and during a six-year period owned more than 70 cars. They were fitting symbols for the actor who always drove himself beyond his known capacities. Although he got into a few traffic snarls with movie companies, Sellers managed to emerge unscathed. It was in private life that he never learned to apply the brakes. Three of his four marriages failed; he suffered his first heart attack at 38 and refused to cut down his schedule; when the world closed in, he sought refuge variously in women, yoga, vegetarianism and overwork.

It is that workaholism that has secured Sellers' reputation. In 52 features, he demonstrated a knack for stealing the soul of his characters and the scenes of his films. Sellers' very virtuosity once made him decide that he had "no personality of my own." He was wrong. In every Peter Sellers performance there are constant elements: meticulous detail and trenchant wit. Imitations alone could not make him the prime farceur of his age. Audiences did not pay to watch the mask; they came to see the man.

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