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As actors go, Geoffrey Rush must be among the bravest. The Australian actor, 53, has dared to interpret controversial historical figures from Leon Trotsky to the Marquis de Sade to Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster. His portrayal of mentally ill pianist David Helfgott in the 1996 movie Shine won him an Oscar, which Rush collected in front of the musician himself. But when Rush was asked to play the legendary British comedian Peter Sellers, he says, "enormous waves of fear rippled through my body." He refused.

In saying no to The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Rush was walking away from a plum role as the man who wove the fabric of British comedy. The Goon Show, the groundbreaking 1950s radio series in which Sellers starred along with Michael Bentine, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, inspired Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the ensemble lunacy of Monty Python — and even now, it is said, reduces Prince Charles to tears of laughter. Sellers' films ranged from acute social satires such as I'm All Right Jack and Being There to brilliant turns in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series. But Rush worried that audiences would scorn his impersonation of the great impersonator. Sellers had "a fairly well-documented life," Rush says. The too-daunting task: "To create some vocal and physical identification with his persona," he says, while "not simply 'doing' him."

The producers kept up the pressure, but Rush — who by now was having great galloping fun as the ghost buccaneer on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean — ignored their pleas. Only when he looked through a batch of off-screen Sellers photos did Rush begin to waver. Each image revealed the profound dissonance between a complex, troubled man and his cheerful creations. "That's when I stopped seeing him as the icon," Rush remembers. "I could see inside him, the melancholy in the eyes, the distracted air, something that was fundamentally human." So Rush finally signed up.

When TIME visited England's Shepperton studios last year, Rush had burrowed even deeper. The makeup people had added a few layers of epidermis (the movie spans four decades, requiring 34 different looks for 28 different characters), and his prosthetic proboscis was threatening to melt in an early summer heat wave. But Rush's inner transformation appeared more durable. One minute, he was stalking po-faced across the set, and the next, he'd turned his charm on, hamming it up with karate chops during a photo shoot, just as the mercurial Sellers might have done. Like the photos that convinced Rush to take the role, Rush's performance contrasts Sellers' public face with a private life distorted by insecurity, rage and dysfunction — menacing his wives and children, insulting those he worked with, and erupting into wild tantrums. To dramatize this, the film, which opens in Britain Oct. 1, uses an inspired conceit: just as Sellers often played several roles in a single movie (such as the ineffectual American President, the British R.A.F. group captain and the nuclear maniac title character in Dr. Strangelove), the biopic employs fantasy sequences in which Rush as Sellers impersonates his pushy mum (Miriam Margolyes), his wives Anne (Emily Watson) and Britt Ekland (Charlize Theron) and even Edwards (John Lithgow) and Kubrick (Stanley Tucci). It's a clever device to depict a man who criticized himself as "a person who has no real value of his own."

A straight Hollywood take on Sellers' life might have reduced it to cliché: the fine line between genius and madness. Indeed, this was the pitch executive producer Freddy DeMann deployed to convince HBO Films, a division of the U.S. cable network, to back the project with BBC Films. (TIME and HBO are both owned by Time Warner.) The pitch succeeded, but hbo Films president Colin Callender aimed for something deeper than that. "It was important to shoot at Shepperton studios, to have a British director [Stephen Hopkins of TV's 24], to hire an actor who understood the roots that Sellers came from," says Callender. Rush, who absorbed Sellers' comedy albums as a teenager in Queensland, locates those roots in time as well as place. "[Sellers] was the court jester mopping up after World War II," he says. "You can feel an instinctive comic talent mocking the whole British class system."

When we visited Rush, we found him bent over a Mac laptop on his dressing table, staring at a DVD of the original Pink Panther. He was memorizing one of Sellers' inspired pieces of slapstick. Several of these are faithfully re-created in the movie and remind viewers why Sellers earned such renown as a comic genius. This particular routine saw Clouseau spin a large globe and then rest his hand on it, to be catapulted to the floor. Satisfied, Rush adjusted his hat, and repeated his lines in his best Clouseau accent: "We mussst fahnd the wooman!"

Finding the woman was not a problem for Sellers, who married four times. Opposition to the movie about his life came not, as Rush originally feared, from Sellers' fans but from one of his exes and other former intimates. Wife No. 2, Ekland, threatened to sue if she was depicted inaccurately. A breakthrough came at the Cannes Film Festival premiere in May, where Ekland agreed to sit with Theron and Hopkins at the screening. "I was on Charlize's right side sweating from nerves, and on her left side Britt was sobbing from reliving bad memories," says Hopkins. "Britt said it was grueling. She was worn out from it."

Viewers, too, may find the story tough going. "By the end of our film," says Rush, "you know something about Peter Sellers, but you still can't reconcile the genius behind some of his films with the tattered fragments of his soul." Sellers, were he alive today, might not enjoy the portrayal. But he'd have to respect the performer who brought those tattered fragments to the screen.

• JEFFREY RESSNER | Los Angeles
• Peter Sellers: a comic genius and a plum role. Why was fearless Geoffrey Rush so reluctant to play him?