That Old Feeling: Who Was Peter Sellers?

The sad clown. The character actor with no character of his own. The Jewish entertainer racked with guilt and self-loathing. The man with a genius for everything but making himself and those around him happy.

So much agita at the heart of so much accomplishment. Peter Sellers would be a showbiz cliché, if he weren’t really a prototype. In his first years of prominence, as a multi-voiced star of Spike Milligan’s “The Goon Show” on BBC radio in the 50s, he had a broad, deep influence on the next decade’s British comedy and music. As a budding movie actor, he made a strong impression in multiple roles; people called him the next Alec Guinness, and they didn’t stop there. Sellers’ chameleonic turns in Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita” and “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” established him as an actor who could blend farce and nightmare, and his six-film tour as the solemn buffoon Inspector Clouseau provided him with every comic’s dream: a franchise character. He also fulfilled the dream of many a sub-hunk: to marry a gorgeous blond Swedish movie actress.

None of this satisfied Sellers; he remained sad, suspicious, self-loathing. “I writhe when I see myself on the screen,” he said in 1961. “I’m such a dreadfully clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, ?Why doesn’t he get off? Why doesn’t he get off?’ I mean I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan’t be able to go on working.”He had a talent to abuse, threatening his wives with tantrums, crockery-crashing and brandished shotguns. He chose movie scripts profligately, appearing in lousy films just to earn money for his expensive enthusiasms. In 1979 he engineered a comeback with “Being There,” a project he had nursed for seven years, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. But he didn’t live long enough to parlayed his retrieved esteem into other ambitious works. He was dead in 1980, at 54.

Twenty-three years later, Peter Sellers us making another comeback. He is the subject of a large, careful biography, Ed Sikov’s “Mr. Strangelove: The Life of Peter Sellers.” And he is being feted in a two-week, 19-feature retrospective at Film Forum, New York’s premier showcase for old movies.

I saw these particular old movies when I was a teenager. In the early 60s I worked in a suburban Philadelphia theater, the Yorktown, where, it seemed, half the movies at the Yorktown starred Peter Sellers. Nearly all his English comedies got to Philadelphia and other large U.S. cities. And there were plenty to go around. In 1962, if you count his cameo in the Hope-Crosby “Road to Hong Kong,” six Sellers films were released.

My friend George Ott had a Pete LP, “The Best of Sellers,” which featured the classic cuts “Balham — Gateway to the South” (a parody of travelogues) and “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” with Sellers as the Indian entrepreneur mounting an adaptation of “My Fair Lady” (among the numbers: “Get Me to the Taj Mahal on Time” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Dhoti”). George and I were kids steeped in the American comic idioms of Ernie Kovacs, Harvey Kurtzman, Jean Shepherd. Suddenly, as foreign films had opened us to a broader definition of movies, Sellers was instructing us in new, weird ways people could be funny.

BEST SELLERS

How big was Sellers in his robust prime? Big enough to justify this statement: the Beatles would not have been what they became if it were not for Sellers and “The Goon Show.” In the mid-50s, as a sideline to his radio broadcasts, he began making comedy records (usually written by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden). Some of the bits featured “Goon Show” characters; the boy Bluebottle performs a searing “Unchained Melody.” Others parodied contemporary pop styles. Skiffle star Lonnie Donegan became Lenny Goonigan; pretty Teddy boy Adam Faith devolved into Twit Conway; Elvis-clone Tommy Iron (Tommy Steele) tried a rock version of Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary.” The bits were collected in “The Best of Sellers” and “Songs for Swinging Sellers”; as singles they often hit the top 20 on U.K. charts. “Goodness Gracious Me,” a bouncy samba that Sellers performed as a duet with Sophia Loren, went to #4. The producer of all these oddities: George Martin.

When the lads from Liverpool were introduced to the man who would make their records, they didn’t care about Martin’s background in jazz, but they were impressed that he had worked with Sellers and Milligan. And when the Beatles came to make a movie, they chose as their producer Walter Shenson, who had produced Sellers’ breakthrough hit “The Mouse That Roared,” and director Richard Lester, who had directed Sellers and Milligan in the avant-gaga short “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film.” The result: “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”, two films that stand with pride in the larky, anarchic tradition of “The Goon Show” and the Milligan-Sellers TV follow-up series, “A Show Called Fred.” That program’s title gets an allusive homage in a “Hard Day’s Night” exchange between a reporter and George Harrison. “What do you call that haircut?” “Arthur.”

The next year Sellers was chosen to present the Beatles with their two Grammy awards, and the group responded in Goonish gibberish-French. Sellers himself had a novelty hit with a rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night” in the spot-on, spat-out manner of the “Winter of our discontent” oration from “Richard III” as memorably declaimed by Laurence Olivier. (Remember that name.) The flip side was “She Loves You,” delivered by Sellers’ Dr. Strangelove character. The producer: George Martin.

STAR BRIGHT, STAR BLIGHT

A cult success on a madcap radio show and a few comedy records — that could have been it for Sellers. Skitcom performers, especially those with skills at mimicry, typically disappear into their roles. When they leave the shows that made them famous, they have trouble radiating coherent personalities on the big screen. That was true for TV’s great skitcom artists: Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Dan Aykroyd, Harvey Korman, Martin Short, Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey. Sellers faced an even bigger hurdle: he was moving from an aural medium to a visual one. His radio fans might not have known what he looked like, and when they saw him, they didn’t swoon at the stout, squat fellow.

But Sellers managed to translate his vocal mutability into a visual variety, applying wigs and fake noses, playing old men and women and, in the process, creating a new kind of stardom. Audiences didn’t go to see the same personality in film after film. They went to find a different Sellers each time. He was his own Waldo or (if you read last week’s column) Nina. A few years later, on the set of “The Pink Panther,” a stranger asked him, “Aren’t you Peter Sellers?” And he replied, “Not today.” That day, he was Inspector Clouseau.

In Seller’s first flush of film fame, accolades came easy, comparisons were flattering. Of course he was compared to Guinness, the dominant comic film actor of Britain’s postwar decade. Guinness had become a star playing eight roles in “Kind Hearts and Coronets”; Sellers played three in “The Mouse That Roared,” the 1959 film that made his name in the U.S., where the political satire with a pacifist tinge was a much bigger hit than in Britain. The Sellers smash that year in the U.K. was “I’m All Right Jack,” a bluff, bilious social satire, with Sellers as the Bolshie shop steward at a missile-making factory. At the next British Film Academy awards, Sellers was named Best British Actor for what was a supporting role; his competition included Richard Burton, Peter Finch and … Laurence Olivier. Jonathan Miller, who took a skeptical view of Sellers’ abiding infatuation with the trappings of stardom, nonetheless thought him “much more subversive and interesting and modern than Olivier.”

Wait a sec. A comic impressionist — one often criticized as a sketch comic who never crawled under the skin of his characters — is “more interesting” than the man widely proclaimed the greatest actor of his century? There was a time when knowledgeable people said this, with hope and seriousness, of Sellers. Another stage director of prominence, Peter Hall, had endured Sellers’ capriciousness and short attention span when he staged the 1958 comedy “Brouhaha.” Yet Hall said Sellers was “as good an actor as Alec Guinness, as good as actor as Laurence Olivier.” And what did Larry think of Peter? Highly. He wanted Sellers to play King Lear at the Chichester Festival.

Most of the people Sikov interviewed for his book have a “but” to offer about Sellers. Miller — who had been a member of the “Beyond the Fringe” team, another 60s quartet influenced by Sellers and the Goons — called the actor “a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can … change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t any character himself.” (Kubrick famously said, “There is no such person as Peter Sellers.”) Hall adds this cogent caveat: “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have.”

He did not have the patience or discipline for theater, which demands that an actor keep a performance fresh the 400th time. On a film set, Sellers was bored by the fourth take. He sparked ideas, voices, a motley crowd of personalities that make make Sybil seem emotionally monotonous. Robert Wagner, a co-star on “The Pink Panther,” said of Sellers, “He had such a circus going on within his head.” Maybe a circus, more likely a cacophony: Barnum & Bedlam. Which made it tough for Sellers, who couldn’t stop the music inside. “Peter’s not a genius,” said Milligan, who knew him well and appraised him frankly. “He’s something more. He’s a freak.” Blake Edwards, director of the “Pink Panther” farces and of “The Party,” a mordant comic highlight of Sellers’ career, offered this opinion, or obit: “I think he lived a great part of his life in hell.”

FOR PETE’S SAKE

Richard Henry Sellers, nicknamed Pete, was born September 8, 1925, to a music-hall artiste, Bill Sellers, and his wife Agnes Marks Sellers, known as “Peg.” Peg’s family had a long, colorful showbiz history; Pete’s great-great-grandfather was Daniel Mendoza, “the most renowned Jewish prizefighter of the 18th century.” (Could there be more than one? Yes.) The boy made his professional debut at the age of two weeks; he was carried on stage and the audience sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

That was the beginning of an odd, pampered childhood. “He was a little monster,” one relative said. When Pete pushed an aunt into a burning fireplace, Peg clucked indulgently. If she was the family’s hearth, Bill was the wallpaper. Spike Milligan semi-jokes that Bill “was dead, and nobody had the courage to tell him.” Milligan has a memorial image of Bill “smoking and playing the piano at one and the same time. The family was full of talent.”

When Peg wasn’t treading the boards, she’d go “golding”: buying bits of gold cheap from unknowing folk in outlying villagers, then selling the bits in London for a healthy profit. Pete would stay in the car, but Peg still seems like a female Fagin, instructing her son in the art of duplicity. Vaudeville or fraud-ville, it was all showbiz to her.

In World War II Sellers was part of “the Gang Show,” an informal comedy troupe, founded in 1932, that raised spirits and money by putting on revues. Peter, an excellent drummer, added comic patter to his routine, and by the end of the 40s he was working regularly on the music-hall circuit and on radio, contributing a panoply of voices to several comedy shows. He had known Milligan, an Army brat raised in India, and fell in with the idea of a radio series that would star him and Secombe and be tethered to Milligan’s free-floating imagination. (Larry Stephens and Eric Sykes would help shape the scripts.) Milligan had always wanted to call it “The Goon Show,” after the Cyclopsian clods in the “Popeye” comic strip. But for the first season, which began May 26, 1951, the program was called “Crazy People.” That seems about right.

THE GOONS GO ON

The “Goon Show” turned Secombe and Sellers into cult stars and Milligan, who wrote nearly all 232 half-hours, into a nervous wreck. The other two stars were free to appear in films and on music-hall bills, returning for the Sunday show, but Spike was chained to his imagination, turning out scripts. “I would write one, and then I had to write another one in five days,” he recalls in the helpful history “The Goons: The Story,” edited by Norma Farnes. “It was an inborn spirit of pressure willing me on to my death.” By the eighth season he had worked himself into a nervous breakdown.

For a few years, each show comprised four or five skits. Not until the fourth season did the Goons find their lasting format: a single story with two musical interludes. The idiot hero, Neddy Seagoon (in Secombe’s crisp, inane tenor voice), would materialize in Caesar’s Rome or Vichy France, find himself in a dreadful scrape, get no help at all from the Goon Gallery — including sassy, slow-witted proto-Goon Eccles (Milligan), the spinster Minnie (Milligan), crusty Maj. Bloodnok (Sellers), whiny young Bluebottle (Sellers), the ancient inventor Henry Crun (Sellers), upper-class cad Hercules Grytpype-Thynne (Sellers) — and somehow emerge triumphant, or at least alive.

But the play wasn’t the thing: “The Goon Show” thrived on Sellers’ mimetic skills and, even more, on Milligan’s verbal Dada, excruciating puns, scream-of-consciousness plotting, and an encyclopedic memory for music-hall farce. Listen to the old shows — which are now available, four to a set, on CD from amazon.co.uk — and see if you’re not groaning and giggling in equal, lavish measure.

The world’s oldest jokes: “Put the cat out.” / “Why?” / “It’s on fire.” … Or: “Have you ever seen a comic strip?” / “Only in a Turkish bath.”

World’s worst puns: For “Rommel’s Treasure,” the announcer begins, “The scene: Libya. The time: the present day. Inside a British officers’ mess at the wadi of El Yah Wont.” Phone rings, is answered by Sellers (as Major Bloodnok): “Wadi a ‘ell ya want?” … Or: Later in that same episode, the Goons rendezvous with a German officer, Gen. Helfisbad. “Who’s General Helfisbad?” / “Mine is. It’s been bad for a year.”

At its freewheeling best, Milligan’s dialogue is not a tennis match of wit but an escalator of illogic, each line a few degrees more ludicrous than the one that preceded it. Sellers (in “Ill Met by Goonlight”): “Crete is in the Mediterranean, you know.” Secombe: “Won’t it get wet?” Sellers: “What? It’s got an umbrella, you idiot.” At times, the madness ascends into brisk sublimity, as in this exchange:

Sellers: Excuse me, Sir, there’s someone to see you.
Secombe: Who is it?
Sellers: Me.
Secombe: Well, ask you to come in.
Sellers: I am in.
Secombe: Then get out!

Britain was a few years behind America in its embrace of television. Throughout the 50s, English audiences still got most of their entertainment on the ear-waves. “The Goon Show” increased its listenership up through its last season, 1960, though it made fun of TV as it did everything else. In the 1954 episode “Lurgi Strikes Britain,” Neddy tells Eccles to “stand on my shoulders and pull me up,” then asides: “I’d like to see them do this on television!” Milligan’s buoyant surrealism would have been impossible to visualize, except by his audience. That’s why he loved radio, “where the pictures are better because they happen on the other side of your eyes.”

THE BRIT PACK

“The Goon Show” had made the many voices of Peter Sellers welcome to the public ear. Now, pursuing a film career, he would join the sprawling family of mid-century character comics who populated English movies — the Brit pack. Each represented a distinct social or regional type; each functioned as human shorthand for screenwriters and audiences alike. Many appeared frequently with Sellers as he rose from featured player to star. A few were part of his portable troupe. Graham Stark (15 films with Sellers), a sergeant in Seller’s Goon Show unit, played butlers and other ignorable functionaries, but he was best at pathetic weasely types, Gollums in galoshes, flashers in smelly raincoats. David Lodge (12 movies) was more robust of physique, a standard tough guy memorable as the sleazy boyfriend in “The Dock Brief.” Kenneth Griffith (6), a 30-year Sellers friend, carved a career as the shrew-pecked husband, ever anticipating humiliation.

Around Sellers prowled a bestiary of delicious tintypes. The queasy smile on the middle-management face of John Le Mesurier (12 Sellers films) semaphored that something was about to go dreadfully wrong, and Le Mesurier’s only victory was in escaping blame for the catastrophe. Dennis Price (7 films) played the aristocrat down on his luck and short of scruples. Thorley Walters (6) blustered in a military fashion; Bloodnok ran through his veins. Miles Malleson (5) played the Aged P. or dotty cleric. Raymond Huntley (5) was the gruff board member, a stickler for the rules unless they go against him; his more agitated twin was Cecil Parker (2), always looking to smooth things over, always knowing he can’t. Irene Handl (5) carved a sweet niche as the smiling, working-class mum, and Hattie Jacques (3) was the stern matron with a woman wrestler’s physique.

The types ranged through the British class system; actors rarely shuttled between posh parts and prole roles. Gap-toothed Terry-Thomas (4 Sellerses) virtually patented the public-school bounder, while his frequent foil, Ian Carmichael (2), was the genial upper-class twit, his perpetual smile ending in fret lines at both edges. Richard Attenborough (4) embodied the council-flats boy on the unscrupulous rise; Lionel Jeffries (4) was the ex-Army copper, his pomposity verging on hysteria, who mistakenly thought it’d be a cinch to nab Attenborough or his Cockney or Midlands pals: ulcerous Bernard Cribbins (3), cocksure Sid James (3), scowling reprobate Bernard Miles (3) or Alfie Bass (2), too soft and apprehensive for the sordid trade he fell into. In this British cosmology, there was just a little room for foreigners: bearded, wild-eyed Norwegian dervish Tutte Lemkow (4), image of the freaky anarchist; and Marne Maitland (5) was that rare bird, an actual Indian — distinct from all the subcontinentals played by Sellers.

Comedy is, at least incidentally, racist. Its coin is exaggeration, and to exaggerate ethnic traits (which may not even exist) is to call attention to differences and take mean pleasure from them. It is overdog humor — in Britain’s case, imperial condescension. In the 19th century Britain conquered the world; in the 20th they lost the Empire but preserved their former subjects in the aspic of caricature. This insular satire, this xenophobic comedy, said that foreigners, insofar as it recognized them, are funny, mockable for the sin of deviating from the white, English norm. For a white Englishman like Sellers to play Fu Manchu or Dr. Banerjee also guaranteed that no actual Chinese or Indian actor would get the job. So Sellers applied the heavy greasepaint in the British version of Al Jolson’s blackface: brown-face.

Sellers, who may never have been questioned about the propriety of playing comic characters from distant climes, would surely have denied racist intent. It was second nature to him. In India during the War, he had donned turban and dark makeup and passed as an Indian Army officer. His first film job, on “The Black Rose” in 1950, had been to dub the voice of Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya, who was playing a medieval Chinaman. Putting on a darker skin was just dressing up to him. It may even have spoken to the foreigner, the alien, within him, while making him an insider by poking fun at outsiders. Still, one has to wonder: What did Indians think of Sellers’ Indian? Perhaps highly: in 1962 he was a guest speaker at Cambridge’s University Indian Society.

SELLERS SATIRE

Besides, the films Sellers appeared in were synoptically derisive. They sent their darts above, below and outside. In the Boulting Brothers’ “Carlton-Browne of the F.O.,” a satire of the British foreign service and of those foreigners who would exploit its stuffy inanity, a toff arrives in the nation of Gaillardia, newly partitioned like Korea or Vietnam, and asks, “Anything to shoot?” Terry-Thomas’ bitter, blinkered reply. “Only the natives.” Another Boulting burlesque, “I’m All Right Jack,” is a sour political fable: Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith” without the happy ending. The world is corrupt, say the Boultings, and those who would fix it must be mad. Sellers’ Fred Kite, a socialist with a Hitler mustache and about as much a sense of humor, talks of a classless society, but frets that blacks will take his comrades’ jobs.

Britain in this period was a caste society, and comedy confronted it head-on, suspicious of both the old way and whatever scheme tried to replace it. “The Battle of the Sexes,” based on James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat,” argued that Sellers’ Mr. Martin, a dear antique in a Scottish wool company, was perfectly justified in wanting to murder the take-charge American woman hired to bring modern method to the place. One of the few Sellers films of this period to look for equilibrium is “The Millionairess,” based on a Shaw play about Epifania, the world’s richest woman (Sophie Loren), and Dr. Kabir, India’s least worldly doctor (Sellers). Like the munitions manufacturer in “Major Barbara,” Epifania tempts Kabir with money to do good. Or will he be as stubborn as a plutocrat in order to prove he is superior to her?

Of his own politics, Sellers expressed little. But he did display some spine in a politically edgy moment. In January 1960, the British Film Institute announced a film lecture series; among the guest speakers were Sellers, the leftist film gadfly Ivor Montagu and Leni Riefenstahl, director of the Hitler documentary “Triumph of the Will” a quarter-century before. Montagu denounced Riefenstahl, the BFI revoked her invitation, and Sellers, the half-Jewish comic, issued this modest, brave statement in defense of Hitler’s favorite director: “Miss Riefenstahl has presumably been invited to lecture because of her outstanding talents as a filmmaker. Alongside her contributions to the art of filmmaking, our efforts, if I may say so, Mr Montagu, appear very puny indeed.” And Sellers’ gesture appears both brave and gallant.

His films (and films in general) soon shrugged off the mordant social tone. He was never an activist actor; he took the roles offered to him, applying the techniques he had used since before “The Goon Show”: finding a voice for the character and building a physical presence around it. John Lewis, his character in the Kingsley Amis sex comedy “Only Two Can Play,” evolved from his observing a Welshman named John Pike. A neighbor of Sellers’, an old Army man, inspired the voice and bearing of the General in “The Waltz of the Toreadors.” For Clare Quilty, Kubrick gave Sellers tapes of the jazz impresario Norman Granz reading passages from the script; Sellers perfectly mimicked the slurring confidentiality of Granz’ New Yawk accent.

He was now was in an epic transition: from the cerebral to the physical, from British cult object to international star, from an actor who was all voice (radio) to one who was mostly mime (the “Pink Panther” comedies of Blake Edwards). The big stepping stones from one shore to the other were the two Kubrick films. His turns as Clare Quilty in “Lolitas” and as the R.A.F. officer, the U.S. President and the German rocket scientist in “Strangelove” shows Sellers’ comic art growing bolder, wilder, perhaps grosser. From then on, he would be at the center of virtually all his films, seeking to find a consistent, appealing personality that the world movie audience might recognize as a commodity called “Peter Sellers.”

POOR PETER

“They say all comedians are sad,” Sellers wrote a friend in a 1963 letter. “I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really a comedian. I don’t know what I am.”

A character actor may also be a faithful husband; both are steady, if unspectacular jobs. But a movie star must wear the musk of Romeo. On “The Millionairess,” his first starring role with an international sex symbol, Sellers became besotted with Loren. He smothered the married actress with his adoration, proclaimed I-love-you’s over his home phone while his kids sat nearby, and, says his son Michael, “he hauled me from my bed at 3 a.m. ?Do you think I should divorce your mummy?'” Michael was just turning six.

“I fell in love with Sophia,” Sellers recalled, “and when I took a look at myself in the mirror I felt sick.” Inside the miserable fat comic, there was a miserable thin one screaming to get out. All it took to shed those 30 ugly pounds was a heart attack. This was in 1964, by which time Sellers was a star with a prima-donna reputation. He was beginning work on Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid” and quarreling with the director at every opportunity. He left the film and, a few weeks later, was stricken. On hearing of the seizure, Wilder supposedly said, “Heart attack? You have to have a heart before you can have an attack.”

Well, he was slim now, and had acquired, as if through plastic surgery of the will, a tight smile that meant to beguile. He burnished his prima-donna rep by tangling even with friends: on “Casino Royale” he got into a fight with his buddy, director Joe McGrath, the two men (in Terry Southern’s phrase) “aiming blows at each other like school girls trying to hit wasps.” Sellers had also divorced Anne, his spouse of ten years, and acquired a trophy wife: Britt Ekland, his co-star on the Neil Simon comedy “After the Fox.”

Ekland was generically gorgeous, though what the blond Swede was doing playing an Italian in “Fox” and a Spaniard in “The Bobo” is anyone’s guess. The marriage soon went sour. On the set of “The Bobo” (which, by the way, is much easier to take than its dismal reputation indicates), Sellers called Ekland “a cunt” in front of the cast and crew. The Italian artisans were furious, contemptuous. When he gave the film’s camera operator a Rolex knockoff as a gift, the man spat on the watch and threw it down at Sellers’ feet. He and Britt divorced in December 1968. Two days later he took her to a London dinner party, and afterward they went to Peter’s place where he threatened her with a £1,200 shotgun. She coaxed him out of his mood and he dissolved into tears. Later he caustically described Ekland as “a professional girlfriend and an amateur actress.”

The man who had hoped to segue from comedy to more nuanced roles stayed a comic actor, returning to the Clouseau role he hated and the director he couldn’t abide. The actor who had spoken of promoting himself to director helmed only one film, the 1961 “Mr. Topaze” / “I Like Money.” The child whose doting mother was the most important person in his life never grew up. He loved collecting toys — a mechanical elephant, an electric organ and dozens of fancy cars — and would invite friends to his home with the conspiratorial enthusiasm of a kid: “Come over and play.” The egocentric star was racked with self-doubt: he would stop his limo to give £5 to a derelict, then chastise himself for thinking, “This’ll make God like me.”

To be a star means coming out from under the cover of the character, the work, the celebrated anonymity of the featured player. Sellers stepped into the spotlight, looked behind him and saw he cast no shadow. He thought he wasn’t there. Which is why it’s poignant that his last role, played with a numbing delicacy, is the emotionally lobotomized Chance the gardener of “Being There.” And why there’s poetry in what he once, jokingly, pronounced as his credo: “What is to be will be even if it never happens.”

Reading “Mr. Strangelove,” I’m sorry that Peter Sellers was the victim and the agent of so much misery. But that doesn’t dilute, not by a drop, the pleasure I got and get from his films — from the daring and precision of his work, the subtle underplaying and the geysering of bizarre brilliance. Someone had to be made happy by the exertions of this sad clown. I guess I’m the one.