The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

2004 "Never judge a man by his cover."
6.9| 2h2m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 01 October 2004 Released
Producted By: Company Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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The turbulent personal and professional life of actor Peter Sellers (1925-1980), from his beginnings as a comic performer on BBC Radio to his huge success as one of the greatest film comedians of all time; an obsessive artist so dedicated to his work that neglected his loved ones and sacrificed part of his own personality to convincingly create that of his many memorable characters.

Genre

Drama, Comedy, Romance

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Director

Stephen Hopkins

Production Companies

Company Pictures

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The Life and Death of Peter Sellers Audience Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie
Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.
Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Neil Welch Biographical movies are always an interesting combination of reality and fiction. You can't tell the story with absolute truth, so you do your best to give the flavour. And here the idea is to give the flavour of the mass of insecurities and contradictions that was Peter Sellers.Let me say that the film is a very clever movie - well structured, well written, and imaginatively designed and directed in an alluring combination of historical reconstruction and surreal meta-reality.And then let me go on to say that Geoffrey Rush is absolutely superb (not that the rest of the cast isn't, but Rush does stand out). He is Peter Sellers. And his performance is so good that you will be astonished, as I still am, at how much a man who looks nothing like Peter Sellers looks so much like him - I think it is all in the performance.Brilliant.
blanche-2 One can never take a biopic as the last word on a person's life, but "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" is a very good look at one of the screen's great comedians and improvisational artists.It's difficult to compress a life into a couple of hours, and as a result, certain incidents are compressed, and no less than two wives are omitted (though Sellers' last wife, Lynn Frederick, is mentioned at the end).Sellers is portrayed by Geoffrey Rush with complete brilliance. He is as much of a chameleon as Sellers himself was. Here, he is not only Sellers in private life but the film Sellers, recreating scenes in "The Pink Panther," "Casino Royale," and "Dr. Strangelove" magnificently.Director Stephen Hopkins adopts a convention of having Sellers at times play different people of his life - as if he is making a film of it - so in one scene, we see Sellers' mother, and then in the next scene, Sellers is in drag as his mother, during which time, he faces the camera and talks to the audience. In one respect, it's interesting; in another, it hits us over the head with aspects of Sellers' personality, as Sellers takes these moments to talk about himself.The depiction of Sellers as an infantile, spoiled, tantrum-prone "empty vessel" who had fantasies of being a smooth Lothario is doubtless correct. He could be very difficult to work with and had an extremely volatile relationship with many people, including director Blake Edwards. His problems are not uncommon ones in artists. Ambitious, he started off probably happily married with a family, but his wife and children became expendable when big stardom came to him. In the end, he left each of his children the equivalent of $2,000 out of a huge estate. Under British law, this amount meant the children couldn't sue for more money. At the time of his death, he was intending to disinherit his fourth wife. She ended up getting everything, and when she died, quite young, her mother got it all. Kind of a last joke on Sellers.The supporting performances are excellent. Emily Watson does a marvelous job as Sellers' first wife Anne, who probably was closer to him than anyone else and whose photo he always carried; Charlize Theron is gorgeous as Britt Ekland, his second wife. Miriam Margolves is effective as Sellers' pampering mother, and Peter Vaughan is very sympathetic as Sellers' quiet, henpecked father, about whom Sellers had some real regrets. John Lithgow does a great job as Blake Edwards.All in all, well worth seeing for the astonishing performance of Geoffrey Rush as a sad, narcissistic man with a big talent and a massive ego, Peter Sellers.
sddavis63 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.
James Hitchcock 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