Peter Sellers: The Man Who Could Be Anyone — Except Himself

He was the greatest comic actor who ever lived. He played a bumbling French detective, a mad Nazi scientist, and the President of the United States — sometimes in the same film. Stanley Kubrick called him a genius. Blake Edwards called him “nuts — really nuts.” Peter Sellers himself said something that haunted everyone who heard it: “If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.” The man who could become anyone had no idea who he was. Sellers suffered a nearly fatal heart attack in 1964 — the first of eight in rapid succession, during which he was clinically dead and experienced what he described as an out-of-body experience. He saw a bright, loving light. A hand reached out to him. He wanted to go toward it. And then he was pulled back. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand what that meant — consulting psychics, communicating with the spirit of his dead mother through séances, and throwing himself into characters so completely that the line between performance and reality ceased to exist. At his memorial service, actor David Niven described him as “expensive, difficult, ungracious, despotic, bitter, depressed, lonely, in a constant state of turmoil, vexatious, quarrelsome, distrustful, self-destructive and arrogant.” And then Niven paused. And said: “He was also the funniest man I ever met.” This is the real story of Peter Sellers. 🎬 Subscribe to Hollywood Vault — the untold stories of Old Hollywood’s most extraordinary lives. #PeterSellers #PinkPanther #HollywoodVault #OldHollywood #DrStrangelove #ClassicHollywood #PeterSellersStory #TrueHistory #Hollywood #InspectorClouseau