The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

‘A fascinating, tragic and instructive story, vividly told’ Sunday Telegraph

Roger Lewis, in his no-holds-barred biography, exposes a Peter Sellers the world little knows. Recognized as the greatest British comic since Charlie Chaplin, Sellers was the grand master of fifty-five films – from Dr. Strangelove, to Being There and the Pink Panther hits.

But shadowing his phenomenal career was a history of increasingly bizarre behaviour involving psychotic violence, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse and humiliating self-destructive obsessions with people including Princess Margaret, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and each of his four wives (Ann Hayes, Britt Ekland, Miranda Quarry and Lynne Frederick). He alternately showered his wives and children with gifts and then threatened to kill them. Sellers’ fluidity as an actor made for a terrifying madness that grew like a slow metastasizing cancer throughout his adult life.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers concludes with his premature death at the age of 54, ‘sick at heart and alone in those sunless hotel rooms’, so recoiled from intimacy that no one really knew him anymore.

PRAISE FOR THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS

‘It is a mad book – but then the subject is a madman. I love Lewis’s passion … I recommend it’ Sunday Times

‘Reinventing the genre as well as reassessing its subject with formidable intelligence, this book is a remarkable achievement’ Literary Review