The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)

The Worst Film Ever

Best movie ever!

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Geoffrey Rush is epic , showing his quality from the very beginning of the film , he manages to pass all the war of emotions that were in Peter Sellers' mind capturing the audience's attention . I think that Geoffrey should have taken a leading role Oscar for his role as Peter Sellers.I now know that he is one of my favorite actors and i want to see many other films with him in the leading role.

Geoffrey Rush is phenomenal as every character played by Peter Sellers in his varied career. The sad story of a man who effectively lost his personality in the characters he assumed is brought to life and it was convincing. I remember feeling sad when Sellers died, but at the same time I saw in his final TV interview that he wasn't able to express who he was. This was evoked very well by this film. It is tragic in many ways but realistic. He was a comedy genius and films like Dr Strangelove could not have been made without him. Peter Sellers' early comedies are also well worth revisiting.I enjoyed the movie and I'm glad i made the effort to see it. All the cast were wonderful and looked like the people they were playing.

Peter Sellers, the late English comic actor, was one heck of a performer. 'The Party', 'The Pink Panther series', oh, what memories of good-cinema. 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' is a biopic on this late icon, which is indeed a fine film to watch. Directed by Stephen Hopkins, this biopic also packs in tremendous performances, brilliant cinematography and slick editing. 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' is a superb journey, of a man, who made the entire world laugh, but within, was a spoiled-brat. His walk with life is filled with problems, loads of success, inner failure, but eventually redeems through self realization. This biopic rocks, and there are no doubts about that. Stephen Hopkins's direction is fine-framed, while Peter Levy's Cinematography & John Smith's editing, as mentioned are pitch- perfect. Performances are Tremendous: Geoffrey Rush as Peter Sellers, is natural to the core. He proves his range once again, and it's indeed time that people start putting him up into the "Cult Actors' section. John Lithgow as Blake Edwards is astonishing, and looks each bit like him. Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland and Emily Watson as Anne Sellers, are wonderful. Miriam Margolyes as Peg Sellers is good. Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick, does well. On the whole, this biopic salutes the late legend, due to it's near-perfect execution. Strongly Recommended, with Two Thumbs Up!

Many film-star biopics suffer from the drawback of being bland and excessively reverential. "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", fortunately, is an exception, perhaps because it would be difficult to be excessively reverent about Peter Sellers, at least about Sellers the man rather than Sellers the actor. The film follows both his private life and his professional life from the 1950s, when he first came to prominence in as a comedian in the British radio programme "The Goon Show", to his death in 1980.Although he had acted in some of the best British comedies of the fifties (such as "The Ladykillers", "I'm All Right, Jack", and "The Mouse that Roared"), it was in the sixties that Sellers enjoyed his greatest international success, based largely on his ability to master a range of different accents and comic voices. Although he had major roles in Stanley Kubrick's two great films "Lolita" and "Dr Strangelove", most people today would associate his name with the Pink Panther series, in which he played the terminally incompetent French detective Inspector Clouseau. It is strange to think that Clouseau was originally only a minor character and that Sellers was only offered the part after Peter Ustinov turned it down. The original film was conceived as a vehicle for David Niven, but the sequels turned into Sellers vehicles when his performance greatly impressed director Blake Edwards.The seventies saw Sellers' career in decline; few of his films enjoyed any success, other than increasingly derivative "Pink Panther" sequels. He did, however, enjoy one final critical triumph for "Being There", based on a story by Jerzy Kosinski, which allowed him to show his skills as a dramatic as opposed to a comic actor and which earned him an Oscar nomination. This was his penultimate film and appeared a year before his death.One remark of Sellers that is given much prominence in the film was that his personality, the "real me behind the masks", had been "surgically removed". This idea may explain the importance of "Being There" for Sellers as the main character, Chance, with whom he identified, is a simpleton who is effectively a blank mask, a man who is seen by others as whatever they want him to be. Yet this idea of Sellers as a man without a personality of his own is not really borne out by the film. It might be more accurate to say that he was a man who looked at his personality, did not like what he saw, and wished that it had been surgically removed.The film shows Sellers as a childish, petulant man, much given to tantrums and emotionally over-dependent on his possessive mother Peg. He also relied heavily on the advice of a clairvoyant named Maurice Woodruff, here portrayed by Stephen Fry as something of a charlatan. He seems to have had difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality, remaining in character as Clouseau or Strangelove even when off screen. His marriage to his long-suffering first wife Anne Howe seems to have broken down when he "confessed" to an affair with Sophia Loren (his co-star in "The Millionairess") which never existed outside his imagination. His second marriage to the beautiful Swedish actress Britt Ekland seems to have been happy at first, but quickly deteriorated and ended in domestic violence. According to the film, the cause of the rupture was that she wanted children and he did not, as his relationship with the children of his first marriage was always a difficult one.Rather surprisingly, the film omits details of Sellers' two subsequent marriages, although I would have thought that his final marriage to Lynne Frederick would have provided the film-makers with plenty of material. Frederick, who was much younger than her husband, was often depicted in the media as a greedy, hypocritical gold-digger, a characterisation which might have fitted well with the film's view of Sellers as a self-deluding fantasist.The film's main strength is the performance from Geoffrey Rush in the title role. Although there is little physical resemblance between the two men, and although, at 53, Rush was considerably older than the character he was playing except for the final scenes, he is incredibly convincing. At times it almost seems as though the real Peter Sellers has been brought back to life. Although Rush is perhaps best known as the fictional pirate captain in "Pirates of the Caribbean", he seems to be at his best playing real-life individuals; he was also very good as Walsingham in the two "Elizabeth" films and brilliant as David Helfgott in "Shine". Most of the other roles are little more than cameos, but one exception is the fine contribution from Emily Watson as Anne Howe.I would not rate this film quite as highly as the deeply moving "Shine"; Peter Sellers was such a difficult, self-destructive character that, however good Rush is, one is never really moved by what happens to him. Nevertheless, this is a fine biography of a man who, whatever his faults, was at his best a very fine actor. 8/10