Amateur snapper, famous name.

Those who grew up with Peter Sellers’s comedy saw the early surreal radio work with Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan (‘The Goons’) for the BBC gestate into the dark comedy of Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and later into the slapstick money maker that was the Inspector Clouseau series of movies made by Blake Edwards.

His performance in Kubrick’s masterpiece (Kubrick only made masterpieces) is notable for the fact that Sellers acted three rôles – the US President, the RAF officer and, most memorably, the crazy German scientist, Dr. Strangelove, modeled on the no less crazy real life clone, Edward Teller, the proponent of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Sellers was also set to play the bomber pilot charged with nuking Moscow, but evaded the part claiming injury to an ankle. There are many versions of this story, but that seems to be the most credible, for you could not possibly have two personalities more different than those of Sellers and Kubrick. The one spontaneous, with a quicksilver wit which dictated that one take was all his short attention span could tolerate. The other cerebral, plodding, intense, leaving nothing to chance and thinking a dozen takes par for the course. Sellers simply wanted out, so feigned the injury. Quite how these two collaborated to craft the greatest black comedy made is a mystery, but we should all be grateful they did. At the conclusion Kubrick remarked that “Sellers is the only actor you pay for four parts and get three”.

Sellers as Strangelove.

Strangelove’s prescription for surviving the coming holocaust, in the obligatory heavy German accent:

The last few minutes of Strangelove contain some of the greatest tragicomedy ever put on the screen in a movie with great performances all round. The closing line “Mein Führer, I can walk!” constitutes a perfect ending to a perfect movie.

Sellers, like many of his ilk, suffered the curse of the comedian, forever insecure and worried that his fame might fade along with his wit. He really should not have worried, having a genius for self reinvention. Once as a kid I recall him on a BBC consumer show where he called in for a job interview affecting an Indian accent – he was roundly turned down – then seconds later called again, this time in perfect BBC English (like they used to speak until populism reared its ugly head), and got the interview. This debunking of bigotry has stayed with me all these years. No-one has equalled Sellers’s genius for mimicry.

There’s an excellent documentary on Sellers’s interest in photography where much of the content was provided by his burgeoning archives, for Sellers was a committed snapper and movie maker from the earliest days of his success. He invariably had the latest in gear and such was the man’s character that he gave generous gifts of hardware to many friends. Now a UK web magazine named Creative Review has published an interesting piece on his photography and you can see more by clicking the image below.

Click the image for the article.