In Lolita (1962), Peter Sellers played Clare Quilty, the shadowy playwright who haunts the edges of Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Quilty appears in disguise after disguise, a man who is never quite himself, and Sellers turns that elusiveness into the film’s most unsettling presence.
Quilty is both comic and menacing, and Sellers keeps the balance by playing each of his incarnations with complete seriousness. The role is a reminder that Sellers’ mimicry was not only a party trick; in Kubrick’s hands it became a way of suggesting a character who has no fixed self. It is one of his darkest performances, and one of his most technically dazzling.