‘A genius but very difficult’: The strange legacy of Peter Sellers

A new documentary about the star of ‘Dr Strangelove’ and the Pink Panther franchise shows that brilliance and neurosis always went hand in hand, says Geoffrey Macnab

An inspector calls: Sellers in ‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again’ (1976), one of his six outings as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau (Rex)

It’s 40 years now since Peter Sellers died of a heart attack aged only 54. His body was cremated in Golders Green crematorium on 26 July 1980. At his thanksgiving service in St Martin’s-in-the-Fields two months later, his fellow film star David Niven gave the eulogy, talking to the mourners about the many barbed obituaries for the star of Dr Strangelove and half a dozen Pink Panther outings.

“Peter Sellers was expensive, difficult, ungracious, despotic, a man who would fire directors and turn scripts upside down, bitter, depressed, lonely, in a constant state of turmoil, vexatious, quarrelsome, distrustful, self-destructive and arrogant,” Niven said as he summed up what the press had written. You might have expected Niven at this point to have dismissed this all as Fleet Street bias and bile. Instead, he acknowledged “Peter was some of these things some of the time.”

Niven added his own observation. “People outside our profession have no conception of the blind fear an actor has of being a failure in public.”