Sellers gets Cannes homage
2004-05-21 21:42
Cannes - Peter Sellers, the manic British comic actor, gave a posthumous bow to the Cannes film festival when a movie of his life, starring Australia's Geoffrey Rush, was screened to critical acclaim.
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers provides an engrossing insight into a man who went from a post-war BBC radio series, The Goon Show, to become the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame, and who played three leads in the seminal Stanley Kubrick feature Dr Strangelove.
For Rush, an Oscar-winning character actor, the chance to play the tightly-wound, disturbed and womanising Sellers - someone who once said he had no real personality outside the different roles he played - was one he almost didn't take.
"I turned it down because I was very afraid of putting it on the line... falling flat," he told a media conference.
But, he finally said yes, tempted by the semi-biographical, semi-fictional narrative that follows Sellers through his tumultuous series of beautiful wives, scene-stealing performances and disconcerting relationship with his mother.
Another Oscar trophy-holder, Charlize Theron, stars as Sellers's second wife, the actress Britt Ekland.
Recreates scenes from several key films
Other actors are Emily Watson as his first wife, John Lithgow as Pink Panther director Blake Edwards, and Stephen Fry as Sellers's conniving fortune-teller.
The self-awareness of a man who had no real self comes through in the film, which goes to lengths to evoke the 1960s and 1970s and even recreates scenes from several of Sellers's key films.
The result is clearly a coup for Rush, who has shown chameleon-like skills in his own career (Shine, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Shakespeare in Love, and as the voice of a shark in Finding Nemo).
"This was a gift," he said, adding that the movie's approach could only open small windows on Sellers's hectic life of ego, sex, drugs and self-loathing.
"Jetsetting, love, everything sped up extraordinarily" for the British actor, Rush said, until the final years when a string of box-offices failures - and one extraordinary film dear to Sellers, Being There - left him a recluse in his Swiss mansion, too spent to respond to requests to do yet another Pink Panther episode.
Sellers died of a heart attack in 1980 aged 54.