Peter Sellers pictured during filming for his new 1963 movie Dr. Strangelove.
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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.