Peter Sellers was born to a well-off English acting family in 1925. His mother and father worked in an acting company run by his grandmother.

As a child, Sellers was spoiled, as his parents' first child had died at birth. He enlisted in the army and fought during World War II, where he met Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, who would become his future workmates. After the war he set up a review in London, which was a combination of music (he played the drums) and impressions. Then, all of a sudden, he burst into prominence as the voices of numerous favourites on "The Goon Show" (1951-1960), making his debut in films in Penny Points to Paradise (1951) and Down Among the Z Men (1952), before making it big as one of the criminals in The Ladykillers (1955).

These small but showy roles continued throughout the 1950s, but he got his first big break playing the dogmatic union man, Fred Kite, in I'm All Right Jack (1959). The film's success led to starring vehicles into the 1960s that showed off his extreme comic ability to its fullest, but after the relative failure of What's New, Pussycat (1965), which was Woody Allen's first film, Sellers embarked on a rapid downfall to "Grade Z" movies in the 1970s, all of which he claimed to have made only because he needed the money. In 1972 he read the book "Being There" and decided to make it into a film. It took him seven years to finally bring it to the screen, but it earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination (he lost to Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of "Superdad" in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)).

Being There (1979) proved to be somewhat of a last hurrah for Sellers, as he died the following year. His last movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), completed just before his death, proved to be another flop. Director Blake Edwards' attempt at reviving the Pink Panther series after Sellers' death resulted in two panned 1980s comedies, the first of which, Trail of the Pink Panther (1982), deals with Inspector Clouseau's disappearance and was made from material cut from previous Pink Panther films and includes interviews with the original casts playing their original characters.

Ashley G. Mackinnon

                       

Courtesy of: http://www.imdb.com