Peter Sellers once famously declared that behind the many masks he wore, there was once a real person, but that he had had it surgically removed. The ultimate role-player, the mercurial Sellers danced on a razor's edge of a fantasy world of his own creation. Real people, who he could charm with his wit, would suddenly find themselves the subjects of the most vicious abuse.
The 2004 HBO and BBC collaboration based on the Roger Lewis book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers looks at the manic personality that lay behind the comic genius. It sports a stellar cast, and is a chance for Geoffrey Rush to put on a bravura performance, not only as Sellers, but also as Seller's mother Peg, his wife Anne, and even as Stanley Kubrick, who directed him in the classic Doctor Strangelove. This reference to Sellers' own multiple roles is one of many devices that the film successfully uses to convey the shifting sands upon which the Sellers image was built.
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers moves in and out of Sellers' fantasy world. Rush morphing into the characters around him show is a way of exploring how Sellers could manipulate the world around him to suit his fantasies. Another scene shows him voicing over documentary footage to make the past more to his liking. These devices also serve as a counterpoint to the meticulous, almost manic way in which Sellers worked himself into a role. A sequence showing Sellers exploring how he would perform Inspector Clouseau while on a commercial flight, causing utter confusion to the stewardess, is almost more hilarious that the original scene in the Pink Panther.
PHOTO COURTESY OF HBO
Director Stephen Hopkins pulls no punches in revealing the dark side of this comic genius, and finds most of the fault lies with Sellers' mother, brilliantly portrayed by Miriam Margolyes, at turns suffocatingly affectionate and heartlessly pushy. She gets her comeuppance, as the film tells it, when Sellers refuses to leave the film set for her deathbed, stating, in her persona, that “stars cannot afford tears.”
Rush does a splendid job in creating a sense of the intense emotional insecurity of Sellers, and his relationship with his first wife Anne (Emily Watson) and subsequently with Britt Eckland (Charlize Theron), are splendidly nuanced, always alive with the sense of fear and inadequacy that he felt about himself and his talents. The enormous price that he paid for his success, which to all intense and purposes cost him his sanity, is ever present. Despite the lavish houses, fast cars and fame of his later years, the terrible pathos of not knowing who you are never diminishes.
Redemption is found in the making of the film Being There, arguably his greatest achievement. It is seen as the great revelation for Sellers, who sees the novel as an articulation of his understanding of his personality and its deficiencies. While the making of the Pink Panther and its sequels are shown to be the result of a desire for fame and money, this was something that Sellers actively sought to make. Sellers was making his own salvation. It ties up the story nicely, giving the film, which is so full of the chaos that Sellers made of life, a clear, defined shape.
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is interesting from a number of perspectives. It provides some lovely details of Hollywood history, is a subtle psychological study, is interesting in the methodology of its presentation, has a soundtrack wonderfully evocative of the era and has much fine acting. It won a slew of awards after it was released, including two Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture Made for Television and also Best Performance for Rush. It is only a pity that we have had to wait so long before it has been brought out in Asia.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist