From the music halls of Portsmouth to the quiet garden of Being There, Peter Sellers turned impersonation into an art form, and left audiences wondering where the performer ended and the person began.
Peter Sellers was born Richard Henry Sellers in Portsmouth on 8 September 1925, into a family steeped in variety theatre. His parents performed on the music-hall stage, and the young Sellers grew up surrounded by songs, sketches and quick changes of character. That early world stayed with him: he learned to listen for an accent, catch a walk, and become someone else for the length of a joke or a scene.
After service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Sellers found his breakthrough in radio. The Goon Show, which began in 1951, made him a household voice in Britain, as he moved between absurd characters with astonishing speed. The show, created with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, showed a gift that would define his screen career: a voice and a face that could disappear entirely into a role.
His film career grew through the 1950s, with The Ladykillers in 1955 and I’m All Right Jack in 1959, for which he won the BAFTA award for Best British Actor. In the 1960s he became internationally known as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964), and in the same period played three roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). The comedy was precise, but it was never only comedy; beneath the accents and disguises there was often a lonely, watchful man.
Later films included The Party (1968) and a return to Clouseau in the 1970s. His final great role came in Being There (1979), in which he played Chance, a sheltered gardener whose simple remarks are mistaken for wisdom. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Sellers died in London on 24 July 1980, at the age of 54. He remains one of cinema’s great transformers, remembered not for one face, but for a thousand, each of them unmistakably his own.