Life & Death of Peter Sellers - Hardcover

Lewis, Roger

3.65

214 ratings by Goodreads

9780712638012: Life & Death of Peter Sellers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0712638016 ISBN 13: 9780712638012

Publisher: Random House UK, 1994

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Book by ROGER LEWIS

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Review:

For one man to have been behind the completely mad roles of Inspector Clouseau, Dr. Strangelove, and Clare Quilty in Lolita is nuts in itself. Any surprise then that Peter Sellers, the comic genius who pulled it all off, was himself a bit of a mad bugger? Roger Lewis recounts the details of Sellers's rise to fame and the sordid mess he made of it in this telling biography. The book succeeds at depicting the actor's artistic genius while also describing the myriad obsessions that ruled his personal life. Drugs, domestic abuse, womanizing, mysticism, and unbridled ruthlessness all fit into the story. As Lewis himself describes it, "What made Sellers an artist on the grand scale was what made him mad: the intensity and excitement of his imagination."

From the Back Cover:

Roger Lewis, in his no-holds-barred biography, exposes a Peter Sellers the world little knows. Recognized as the greatest British comic since Charlie Chaplin, Sellers was the grand master of fifty-five films - from Dr. Strangelove, to Being There and the Pink Panther hits. But shadowing his phenomenal career was a history of increasingly bizarre behavior involving psychotic violence, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse and humiliating self-destructive obsessions with people including Princess Margaret, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and each of his four wives (Ann Hayes, Britt Ekland, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick). He alternately showered his wives and children with gifts and then threatened to kill them. Sellers' fluidity as an actor made for a terrifying madness that grew like a slow metastasizing cancer throughout his adult life. The story of Peter Sellers concludes with his premature death at the age of 54, "sick at heart and alone in those sunless hotel rooms", so recoiled from intimacy that no one really knew him anymore.

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