The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

Day 80 - 3/21/09 - Movie #77

BEFORE: My exploration into the dark side of fame continues... I picked up all of the "Pink Panther" movies off cable last year - the old ones with Sellers, not the Steve Martin remake. They're not on my list because I watched them all as a kid - just probably not all the way through, or in the proper order. I do have a lot of respect for Sellers, who was a sort of acting chameleon, often playing multiple roles in each film! But I admit to knowing almost nothing about the man behind the characters.

THE PLOT: The story of the comic actor, who would later immortalize bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther series, a man whose personal life clashed with stardom, while he was an individual completely immersed in the characters he portrayed.

AFTER: Well, I wasn't too shocked that this film went with the "sad clown" theory on comedic actors - the notion that behind every comic actor, there's a neurotic screw-up in real life. But perhaps with Sellers, this rings true. He screwed up his marriages, was a bastard to deal with, and had a mommy fixation? Sounds believable... The most brilliant thing about this movie was the casting, and I rarely find this to be true. Who else but Geoffrey Rush could fill the shoes of Sellers, disappearing into a series of quirky characters like Clouseau? But also the supporting roles are extremely well cast - Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards, and Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick - brilliant! The movie then raises the bar by having Rush, as Sellers, also step into the personas of his wife, mother, father, and even Blake Edwards and Kubrick, to talk to the camera in a commentary/revisionist history of Sellers. Seeing Rush playing Sellers, playing Lithgow, playing Edwards? Surreal.

RATING: 8 out of 10 fake accents