“I just talked to God, and he told me how to do it!”—Peter Sellers, interrupting the beauty sleep of his Pink Panther director Blake Edwards with an overnight phone call, explaining how a particularly difficult scene could be filmed.
“Peter, the next time you talk to God, tell Him to stay out of show business!”—Edwards to his star the next day, after he madly took his advice and saw the disastrous results.
--Sellers and Edwards quoted in Clifton Fadiman and Andre Bernard, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes (2000)
Peter Sellers was born on this date 85 years ago. As the exchange with Edwards indicates, the comic star could be as mad as a hatter.
At the same time, he was such a genius that his death at age 54 from a bad heart makes you wonder what more he might have accomplished had he lived even five years longer.
Then you remember the other side of Sellers, and wonder what other brilliant work he could have put on screen while he was alive--if he hadn’t been insane.
Case in point: Billy Wilder’s 1964 film, Kiss Me, Stupid.
What, you don’t remember this? Not surprising, because a) the movie—generally derided at the time as “smutty” (plot: an aspiring songwriter, desperate to get his latest tune sung by a Lothario of a singer, played by Dean Martin, makes his nubile young wife available to the entertainer)—might have been the most resounding flop of the great writer-director’s career, and b) though cast in the film, Sellers had to be replaced because of a heart attack.
Six years ago, in a Wall Street Journal reminiscence, a supporting actor in that film, Tommy Nolan—later a book reviewer and biographer of Ross Macdonald and Artie Shaw—wrote how Sellers wrecked that film: first by making increasingly impossible demands, then by taking amyl nitrates on his mid-shooting honeymoon, the better to keep up with his frisky young bride, Britt Ekland—the latter act leading to the cardiac condition that plagued him for the rest of his life.
And yet, Nolan couldn’t help but express his admiration for Sellers. The star's replacement in Kiss Me, Stupid, Ray Walston, was a fine, responsible human being and as professional an actor as you could get. But Sellers, Nolan concludes, would have been something else again. His takes were so wildly inventive, his improvisations just so plain brilliant, as to be beyond that of any normal good actor.
Whenever he feels a “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, Ishmael tells us in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, he sets out to sea. My remedy is much less extreme and expensive—and, to me, funnier and far more gratifying. Put me in front of any of Sellers’ five “Pink Panther” movies and I’ll be laughing helplessly in no time.
“Peter, the next time you talk to God, tell Him to stay out of show business!”—Edwards to his star the next day, after he madly took his advice and saw the disastrous results.
--Sellers and Edwards quoted in Clifton Fadiman and Andre Bernard, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes (2000)
Peter Sellers was born on this date 85 years ago. As the exchange with Edwards indicates, the comic star could be as mad as a hatter.
At the same time, he was such a genius that his death at age 54 from a bad heart makes you wonder what more he might have accomplished had he lived even five years longer.
Then you remember the other side of Sellers, and wonder what other brilliant work he could have put on screen while he was alive--if he hadn’t been insane.
Case in point: Billy Wilder’s 1964 film, Kiss Me, Stupid.
What, you don’t remember this? Not surprising, because a) the movie—generally derided at the time as “smutty” (plot: an aspiring songwriter, desperate to get his latest tune sung by a Lothario of a singer, played by Dean Martin, makes his nubile young wife available to the entertainer)—might have been the most resounding flop of the great writer-director’s career, and b) though cast in the film, Sellers had to be replaced because of a heart attack.
Six years ago, in a Wall Street Journal reminiscence, a supporting actor in that film, Tommy Nolan—later a book reviewer and biographer of Ross Macdonald and Artie Shaw—wrote how Sellers wrecked that film: first by making increasingly impossible demands, then by taking amyl nitrates on his mid-shooting honeymoon, the better to keep up with his frisky young bride, Britt Ekland—the latter act leading to the cardiac condition that plagued him for the rest of his life.
And yet, Nolan couldn’t help but express his admiration for Sellers. The star's replacement in Kiss Me, Stupid, Ray Walston, was a fine, responsible human being and as professional an actor as you could get. But Sellers, Nolan concludes, would have been something else again. His takes were so wildly inventive, his improvisations just so plain brilliant, as to be beyond that of any normal good actor.
Whenever he feels a “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, Ishmael tells us in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, he sets out to sea. My remedy is much less extreme and expensive—and, to me, funnier and far more gratifying. Put me in front of any of Sellers’ five “Pink Panther” movies and I’ll be laughing helplessly in no time.
