In Dr. Strangelove (1964), Peter Sellers played three roles in one film: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and the wheelchair-bound Dr. Strangelove himself. Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about nuclear war gave Sellers a stage for everything he could do, from a clipped British officer to a soft-spoken American president to a gleefully sinister scientist.
The three performances are distinct in voice, posture and temperament, yet they share Sellers’ gift for finding the human weakness inside an absurd situation. Mandrake is decent and desperate, Muffley is reasonable in an unreasonable room, and Strangelove is the id of the war machine, barely contained. Together they make the film one of the great triple performances in cinema, and a defining example of Sellers as a chameleon who could carry a film in three skins at once.