An Unsettling, Relentless Biography of an Unsettling, Relentless Movie Star

‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers’By Roger Lewisriverrun, 960 pagesThis new edition of a biography, first published in 1994, includes a foreword by actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer Steve Coogan, now to be seen in the Netflix true crime thriller series, “Legends,” who lauds Roger Lewis’s “forensically insightful biography.”Mr. Coogan sets the tone: an “emotional tornado of talent caused havoc to all who crossed his path. Tortured genius or spoilt narcissist depends on your point of view.” A figure of such volatility like Sellers is bound to be a vexing subject for a biographer who has been known to be as wickedly funny as his subjects. Mr. Lewis’s wonderfully scathing biography of Anthony Burgess, the great prolific pretender to the title of great novelist, received several tsk tsk reviews in the UK. Poet Philip Larkin observed: “The whole of English Lit. at the moment is being written by Anthony Burgess.”Mr. Lewis does not belong to that prevalent school of modern biographers who present the facts in carefully measured narratives that are supposed to let the reader decide how to view the subject. He relishes a more give-and-take approach that riles many readers. The point of having Mr. Coogan’s testimony is to shift the burden to the subject. In other words, don’t blame the messenger.Sellers, as Mr. Lewis shows, could be as bumbling as his famous character, Inspector Clouseau, and as maniacal as Dr. Strangelove, with a capacity to play, as well, the staid Group Captain Mandrake in the same Stanley Kubrick film about Cold War paranoia in the nuclear age.Mr. Lewis has an uncanny ability to penetrate his subjects’ defenses. He does not allow them to elude his keen eye in their efforts to hide themselves from view. It takes a long biography to get at the lengths to which Sellers tried to conceal himself behind his work as an actor.A review cannot do justice to Mr. Lewis’s method, or to what Sellers was attempting to cover up, without substantial quotation:“In interview after interview, Sellers explained his strangeness by claiming: ‘I have no personality of my own, you see. I could never be a star because of this. I’m a character actor. I couldn’t play Peter Sellers the way Cary Grant plays Cary Grant, say – because I have no concrete image of myself. I look in the mirror and what I see is someone who has never grown up – a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths. You know, it’s a funny thing, but when I’m doing a rôle I feel it’s the rôle doing the rôle, if you know what I mean. When someone tells me, “You were great as so-and-so”, I feel they should be telling this to so-and-so, and when I finish a picture I feel a horrible sudden loss of identity.’“The suggestion that when he was not employed as an actor he was an empty space, disembodied like a ghost (he told Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show that ‘There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed’), was a convenient and complicated fiction. Convenient because he could detach himself from the consequences of his bad behaviour.”The Lewis approach to biography deeply disturbs some readers and sometimes the friends of the biographical subject, so that, for example, reader comments on Amazon about him include “a horror novel” and “determinedly negative.” I know, I know, such customer comments don’t really deserve mention, except that they do reflect the unsettling impact of a biographer who chooses unsettling subjects.What is so appealing about Sellers the actor — his versatility, his range from manic to depressive characters — was also his way of escaping the responsibility of manhood, Mr. Lewis argues, in shrewdly pinpointing the actor’s “insistence on being discontinuous.” In other words, to play Peter Sellers, the way Cary Grant played Cary Grant, would have meant taking responsibility for himself, for Peter Sellers per se.What puts Mr. Lewis in the company of a great biographer like, say, Robert Caro, is a certain relentlessness, a tenacity, that grips the subject with a ferocity that is seldom seen in contemporary biography.Mr. Rollyson has authored biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Ronald Colman, and (forthcoming) Eve Arden.

An Unsettling, Relentless Biography of an Unsettling, Relentless Movie Star

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