\u2018He made me so happy I forgot about my spots\u2019<\/p>\n
Michael Palin<\/p>\n
Along with Spike Milligan<\/a>, Peter Sellers lit up my teenage years. I knew that Connie Francis would never return my love, but Spike and Peter delivered something almost as good \u2013 and that was deep, satisfying and highly contagious laughter. Laughter that made me so happy I forgot about my spots.<\/p>\n Spike was the imaginative genius who wrote The Goon Show but it was Sellers who brought me to tears with his gallery of unforgettable characters: Major Bloodnok, Bluebottle, Henry Crun, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne.<\/p>\n He was my hero long before I knew what he looked like. On my first day at Oxford university, I made a lifetime friendship founded on a mutual adoration of the album Songs for Swingin Sellers (with a pair of legs swinging from a branch on the cover). Sellers was not just a man of many voices, he was a gifted actor, and each voice came with a character. The more I heard him the more I wanted to be like him. He showed me there was something far more important than sport and girls and modern history class, and that was making people laugh.<\/p>\n \u2018His funniness was just magically there\u2019<\/p>\n Woody Allen<\/p>\n All I can say about Peter was that apart from all his character skills and voices and technical brilliance, he had a built-in funny quality and made you laugh the minute he appeared on screen. It\u2019s nothing you can learn and very few even successful comics have it. I\u2019m sure there was nothing he could do to produce it or understand it himself. It was just magically there, that funniness.<\/p>\n \u2018I remember thinking: \u201cIs it\u00ad \u00adpossible to die from laughing?\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n Sanjeev Bhaskar<\/p>\n When I was a kid, my parents and their friends would have these dinner parties, for want of a better term, where the children were all fed first and then shoved into a room with the telly. One night, a film called The Party came on the TV, the one where Sellers plays an Indian actor. I watched it and I remember thinking: \u201cIs it possible to die from\u00a0laughing?\u201d Because I was laughing so much I was in pain.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a controversial film now but I still love it, in the same way that I always defend It Ain\u2019t Half Hot Mum. We\u2019re living in a time where people strip things of context, and either celebrate or denigrate things. But for me his performance was so funny and it was so deftly done. Given its time, I don\u2019t find anything offensive about it. I think, crucially, he wasn\u2019t trying to be offensive. He had already played an Indian character in The Millionairess with Sophia Loren and that was why I suggested their song title, Goodness Gracious Me, for our sketch show, because it\u2019s reclaiming it. It sounds more grand than it really was, but we were trying to suggest a changing of the guard. But again, I wasn\u2019t offended as a child and I\u2019m not offended as an adult. I think it\u2019s of its time. You wouldn\u2019t do that now \u2013 you\u2019d find a good Asian actor to play the part \u2013 but I always had an affection for him.<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s controversial now, but I still love it\u2019 \u2026 Peter Sellers in The Party. Photograph: Cine Text\/Sportsphoto\/Allstar<\/p>\n I think of the 10 years after The Ladykillers (1955) as peak Sellers, until Dr Strangelove<\/a> (1964) \u2013 a work of genius. That period includes the first two Pink Panther films, The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964), which is, I think, my favourite Clouseau. His brilliance until then is to do with the precision of his performances in terms of character, of vocalising and comic timing. Maybe he was trying to prove himself \u2013 his Fred Kite in I\u2019m All Right Jack is a performance without ego. Then he suddenly became a global star, and I think that status meant he became less precise in his performances \u2013 until we get to Being There which was him back to his best: a really precise, detailed performance.<\/p>\n There is a lot that has been written and said about Sellers and what always stuck with me was that his big fear was if you stripped away his characters you wouldn\u2019t find anything there. Blake Edwards said he had the best working times ever with him \u2013 and the worst. So I think that he was obviously a complicated person but when you look at it in terms of sheer talent, he was blessed. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever been a\u00a0better comic actor.<\/p>\n \u2018I met him for dinner \u2013 it was like going to meet the queen\u2019<\/p>\n Lesley-Anne Down<\/p>\n My father, like the rest of the country, absolutely adored The Goon Show, and I grew up listening to it. When I did The Pink Panther Strikes Again in 1976, I was working with an icon \u2013 I mean, not even human, he was like a god. The first time I met him was in Munich. The publicist on the movie said Peter wants to have dinner with you, and I remember they were really tense about it. They said: don\u2019t do this, and don\u2019t say that, and, you know, just be a certain way. It was like going to meet the queen. It made me very tense as well, but within five minutes we just hit it off. Obviously I was a bit younger than he was, he was my dad\u2019s age, but we got on exceptionally well. And unlike any amount of men that I have worked with or come into contact with on both sides of the camera, he was a total gentleman for the entire shoot.<\/p>\n And it was a very long shoot. Today it would have taken about three weeks, but because it was Peter it was 14 weeks. He\u2019d just be laughing and playing jokes and tricks all day long, sometimes we never actually got a shot completed. We hung out basically day and night for 14 weeks. The crew was huge. It must have cost a fortune but everyone was on board with it, it was like being at a comedy show. Everybody laughing, everybody having fun. I mean, it really was an amazing experience.<\/p>\n Sellers and Lesley-Anne Down in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Photograph: United Artists\/Kobal\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t sleep very much, he liked to stay up all night and end up in the clubs. He loved [vocal ensemble] The Manhattan Transfer<\/a>, which at the time was a great sound. He smoked a bit of dope, too. I don\u2019t think Peter really liked himself particularly, but a lot of comedians are that way. They\u2019re depressed and they cover it up with laughter. He was always searching for happiness, and people didn\u2019t take tremendous care of themselves back then. Nobody said, I\u2019ve got to go to the gym or the treadmill; people just ate and drank what they wanted and did what they wanted.<\/p>\n I knew there was a side of Peter that could be difficult or disruptive. I had been told about it, but I don\u2019t remember any of that. I think there was one day that Peter and Blake [Edwards] were sitting in their chairs on set, and they were a little bit tense and not talking to each other. I don\u2019t know what that was about, I wasn\u2019t privy to it. But that was the only time that I ever saw anything. I didn\u2019t see Peter being cross or upset or nasty or anything. I only saw his funny, jolly, kind side. We got on like a house on fire. He was a genius. Seriously, what a career.<\/p>\n \u2018When he did films for directors that knew enough to give him freedom, the results were great\u2019<\/p>\n Christopher Guest<\/p>\n