The Cult of Peter Sellers: Why Comedy's Biggest Stars Are Fans of the Late British Actor

Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove

While talking to Yahoo Movies while promoting his Oscar-touted drama Foxcatcher, there was one actor in particular that Steve Carell named as an inspiration: Peter Sellers. “His influence rubbed off on me, not just in terms of Foxcatcher, but in general,” the star told us. “He’s someone who could play the broadest, or the most tightly wound, subtle characters, for the same effect. Everything he did was very grounded and believable and you never got a sense that there was Peter Sellers there.”

Carell is far from alone in his admiration for Sellers, best known for his Oscar-nominated performance as the titular character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, and for creating the character of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. Almost every big comedy name since the 1960s has credited him as an influence. Michael Palin of Monty Python once described seeing him for the first time as being like “hearing Elvis Presley do ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ for the first time.”

Steve Martin has related how Sellers inspired him to keep going after the hostile reviews of his first starring role, The Jerk (now considered a comedy classic), while Mike Myers described himself as “a devotee” of the actor. Jim Carrey impersonated him at the Oscars and called him “one of my favorites,” while Robin Williams considered Sellers “the most influential actor” on his career.

Contemporary comedians, even those barely alive when Sellers passed away in 1980, still speak of him in reverent tones. Will Ferrell praised his “unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time,” while Sacha Baron Cohen echoed those thoughts, saying that Sellers was “this incredibly realistic actor who was also hilarious and who managed to bridge the gap between comedy and satire,” and everyone from Kristen Wiig to Key & Peele have name-checked him. But what was it about Sellers that caused him to be a touchstone for several generations of comics?

As the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau in 1964’s The Pink Panther

Born in Portsmouth, England in 1925, Sellers came to fame in Britain alongside colleagues Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe thanks to hugely popular radio comedy The Goon Show, where he got to show off his eclectic and impressive range of voices and characters for the first time. The series was a huge influence on Python, and even the Beatles, who selected George Martin as their producer because of his work on novelty records with Sellers.

The Goon Show ended in 1960, by which time Sellers had already made inroads into movies, most notably a supporting turn alongside Alec Guinness in the Ealing dark comedy-classic The Ladykillers. Hollywood soon beckoned: Sellers debuted, in an extended cameo, as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther in 1963 before headlining his own spin-off, A Shot In The Dark, the following year (with three further sequels  to come). Even more important, Stanley Kubrick cast him in a head-turning part in Lolita in 1962, followed by his Cold War black comedy Dr. Strangelove, in which Sellers brilliantly played three very different characters.

In this memorable scene from Dr. Strangelove, Sellers plays both the comically ineffectual President and the titular wheelchair-bound former Nazi:

There were plenty of lows in the years after: a series of tempestuous marriages and affairs; a heart attack, reportedly caused by the use of amyl nitrites as a sexual stimulant, that forced him to drop out of Billy Wilder’s 1964 comedy Kiss Me Stupid, bad behavior on and off set, flops and financial difficulties. Nor did he find much happiness or comfort in his success: Sellers wrote to a friend in 1963, as he started to go supernova, “They say all comedians are sad. I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really a comedian. I don’t know what I am.”

He wasn’t the only one: director Jonathan Miller once called him “a receptacle rather than a person… like a lot of people who can change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t any character himself” (During a guest appearance on a 1978 episode of The Muppet Show, Sellers told Kermit the Frog, in a startling bit of confession, “I could never be myself… you see, there is no me.”)

Still, the actor enjoyed several late-career triumphs, including several successful Pink Panther sequels, and a second Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the holy fool Chance — significantly, a cipher just like Sellers himself — in Hal Ashby’s acclaimed 1979 comedy-drama Being There. That film would be the last released during Sellers’ lifetime: he passed away from another heart attack in July 1980, at the relatively young age of 54.

With Shirley MacLaine in 1979’s Being There

The actor’s diverse range of characters and voices, and the sheer commitment with which he approached them, has inspired generations of comedians. As Carell said in an interview last year, “[Sellers] never indicated that he thought what he was doing was funny; he never winked at the camera.” The ways in which Sellers influenced later performers didn’t just stop there. Through his work with Kubrick, the underrated 1970 drama Hoffman, and Being There, Sellers was one of the first comedians whose screen performances could cross over to more serious territory. The actor demonstrated that he could tackle more meaningful material with the same absolute dedication as he did with the sillier fare.

It’s possible that Sellers’ personal life has some impact on modern comedians too: the knowledge that he battled his own demons, and that his commitment to his roles had a cost, could serve as a cautionary tale, or even a comfort, to the chameleonic actors who’ve since followed in his footsteps.

But on the whole, his influence has been a positive one. Without his pioneering work, it’s difficult to imagine that creations as varied as Mork, Ace Ventura, Austin Powers, Borat or Ron Burgundy would have come to exist. And without him, it’s equally hard to think that those same performers could have won Oscars, appeared in films directed by Quentin Tarantino or Tim Burton — and given performances as powerful and unrecognizable as the one that Carell gives in Foxcatcher. (Additional reporting by Meriah Doty.)

Photos: @Everett Collection