While a major star and popular with audiences, Sellers was incredibly difficult to work with behind the scenes, and he struggled with depression, insecurity, drug abuse, and multiple health issues. He also burned through four marriages and nearly drove Pink Panther director Blake Edwards to the brink.
Despite his many faults, Sellers was a comic genius whose talents remain unmatched. Here are seven of the very best classic movies starring Peter Sellers.
1. 'I'm All Right Jack' – 1959
One of the most successful movies British films of 1959, I'm All Right Jack was a finely tuned satirical comedy on 1950s working-class life that turned Sellers into an international star. Sellers played Fred Kite, the manager of a missile factory who is initially suspicious of Stanley (Ian Carmichael), a newly graduated dolt from Oxford and all-too-eager to do a good job. Fred takes Stanley under his wing and even provides him a room at his own, but the two find themselves on opposite sides when the factory decides to strike. While Sellers isn't the main focus of I'm All Right Jack—that honor goes to Ian Carmichael—he did show the comic versatility that would inform his later, most beloved films.More »
2. 'The Millionairess' – 1960
A sophisticated comedy from British director Anthony Asquith, The Millionairess starred Sellers opposite Sophia Loren in a role that allowed the actor a rare display of warmth and selflessness. Adapted from the George Bernard Shaw play of the same name, the film starred Loren as a beautiful woman whose recent inheritance has turned her into the wealthiest woman in the world. Even though she's rich beyond her wildest dreams, all she really wants is to marry the right man. Her first attempt at marriage ends in disaster, while her therapist attempts to move in amidst the wreckage. On the verge of giving up, she meets a kindhearted Indian physician (Sellers) who seems uninterested in her money and her beauty. Naturally, she believes he's the right man, but he turns out to be a tougher customer than she bargained for. Sellers delivered an eye-opening performance as the mild-mannered doctor, a role he almost turned down until he learned that he'd be starring opposite Loren. Sellers entered into a love affair with the actress that helped secure a divorce from Anne Howe a few years later.More »
3. 'Lolita' – 1962
With this heavily censored adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, Sellers embarked on a two-film collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick that the actor deemed the most rewarding of his career. Though Lolita belongs to James Mason, who portrayed the doomed Humbert Humbert, Sellers shined as the shape-shifting Clare Quilty, a smarmy playwright who later poses in various guises as he follows Humbert's lust for a teenage girl (Sue Lyon). Sellers was originally apprehensive about taking the role, fearing that he wouldn't be able to pull off playing a flamboyant American. But with the help of jazz producer Norman Ganz, Sellers developed a free-form approach to the role that opened his artistic palette and allowed him to portray the expanded character in a number of different ways, thus putting him in high demand to play multiple roles in the same film.More »
4. 'Dr. Strangelove' – 1964
Without a doubt his most famous film outside The Pink Panther series, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a brilliant Cold War satire from Stanley Kubrick, allowed Sellers to put on an extraordinary display of comic prowess in three distinct roles. A chilling, but hilarious examination of the insane nuclear policy of mutually assured destruction, Dr. Strangelove cast Sellers as Captain Lionel Mandrake, an attaché forced to confront a madman Air Force general (Sterling Hayden) intent on starting World War III; President Merkin Muffley, a mild-mannered president trying to stopping a wayward nuclear bomber from the war room; and Dr. Strangelove himself, a former Nazi scientist with the uncontrollable urge to call the president "Mein Füher!" Dr. Strangelove featured excellent performances from the other cast members, especially George C. Scott as a jingoistic general, Slim Pickens as a good ol' boy bomber pilot—a fourth role originally slated for Sellers—and Sterling Hayden as an unhinged Air Force commander enamored with bodily fluids. But it was Sellers who stood out among the rest and earned an Academy Award nomination for his larger-than-life performances.More »
5. 'A Shot in the Dark' – 1964
The second Pink Panther movie and the first to feature Sellers' Inspector Clouseau as the lead character, A Shot in the Dark has long been considered the funniest film in the series. Directed by Blake Edwards, the movie had nothing at all to do with the sought-after pink diamond and instead saw Clouseau trip, stumble, and crash his way through a murder at a Parisian estate. Right away, the estate's doe-eyed maid (Elke Sommer) is the prime suspect and Chief Inspector Dreyfuss (Hebert Lom) is about to arrest her, but the devastatingly clumsy Inspector Clouseau steps in with ideas of his own. Despite falling down stairs and clobbering the staff with a medieval mace, Clouseau is dead-on with his hunch that the maid is being set up to take the fall. Featuring one hilarious sequence after another—none better than Clouseau's tumble down stairs while dismounting the parallel bars—A Shot in the Dark showed Sellers in top form.More »
6. 'Murder By Death' – 1976
A very funny mystery comedy featuring an all-star cast, Murder By Death is one of those movies that either fails or succeeds strictly on the chemistry of its high-powered cast. Luckily, the film largely succeeds with one hilarious scene after another, as it follows a group of world famous detectives called to the eerie estate of wealthy recluse Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) to investigate the murder of...Lionel Twain. Among those called to action are the Charlie Chan-like Sidney Wang (Sellers); Thin Man sleuths Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith); Hercule Poirot imitation Milo Perrier (James Coco); Miss Marple variation Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester); Same Spade-Philip Marlowe combo Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), whose tough-guy bravado masks a more effeminate side; and Alec Guinness as a blind butler with something to hide. While there are great performances all around, Sellers stood out as Wang, whose endless aphorisms and poor diction annoy the other guests.More »
7. 'Being There' – 1979
By the end of the 1970s, Sellers was suffering a series of health-related issues atop of professional and personal problems. He had suffered heart ailments for years, partly brought on by drug use, and saw the end of his fourth marriage. Increasingly difficult to work with and tiring of appearing in Pink Panther movies—his only successful films at the time—Sellers threw everything he had left into playing Chance, a child-like butler who has done nothing more with his life than tend the garden of a wealthy man and watch TV. But when his benefactor dies, Chance is forced into leaving his cloistered world and discovers the world outside for the first time. Where other actors would have gone over the top playing the simple-minded Chance, Sellers was brilliantly nuanced in his portrayal of a plain man mistaken by Washington society for being of profound intelligence. Without a doubt the best performance of his career, Sellers earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, but was deeply disappointed when he lost out to Dustin Hoffman. Sellers died of a heart attack a mere seven months after the release of Being There. He was 54.More »