Remembering Peter Sellers, the outstanding comic actor of his time

By D.B.

PETER SELLERS died 40 years ago, aged only 54, yet his reputation endures in a way many of his peers’ have not. It is hard to think of any British comic actor—indeed, any Western comic actor at all—of his era who remains so celebrated. But then, none had his uncanny improvisational ability or his astonishing range: the result, he always claimed, of having no real character of his own.

The BBC, which in 1995 gave three episodes of its flagship “Arena” arts programme over to an exhaustive documentary on Sellers—most subjects are covered in one—still considers him a sufficiently important figure for a substantial new film. “Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy” concentrates chiefly on Sellers’s personal life, to which his career is presented as a backdrop. One effect of this is to show what a relatively small proportion of his films have stood the test of time—or passed muster even in their own day. Soon after Sellers’s death, Tom Shale, a critic, observed that there could be few “good actor[s] who ever made so many bad movies as Sellers, a comedian of great gifts but ferociously faulty judgment”.