Peter Sellers
I have three none too proximate connections with Peter Sellers.
My late father was once on a plane with Peter Sellers, a fellow passenger going to the South of France, when he experienced cardiac problems. My father did his best to tend to him but he was none too impressed by celebrities as patients. as he considered them bad payers.
I never knew if he was paid but Sellers had four heart attacks in all dying of the last aged 54. In the early 80s I worked at a South African firm where one of the partners knew Ted Levy, second husband of Peter Sellers’ first wife Ann Hayes.
The story goes that Peter Sellers had an affaire with Sophia Loren whilst making The Millionairess and to placate his wife had bought a penthouse at Highpoint Highgate.
Ted Levy was commissioned to design a duplex with the flat below. Ted Levy moved in with Ann Hayes and Peter Sellers decamped to the Dorchester where he met Britt Ekland.
Thirdly, in the early 80s I used to go to club called Legends as its owner Campbell Palmer was a family friend.
Lynn Frederick then I believe only 24 – Sellers fourth wife – was a regular and I can see her now, jeans tucked into kid boots. She inherited the Sellers fortune.
His two children from the first marriage – Michael and Victoria – were cut out from the will and the source for a biopic starring Geoffrey Rush in which the actor was portrayed in a poor light.
Last Saturday there was programme about him: Peter Sellers: a State of Comic Ecstasy .
He was an inveterate photographer. So there was much source material and an interview in 2004 for the arts programme Arena. Those wives still alive and various secretaries supplied their own appraisal, mainly critical.
I recall Barry Norman describing him as “duplicitous”.
Nonetheless Sellers was a comic genius, at his best able to perform 2/3/4 roles in a film showcasing his mimicry, but he was an unhappy man. No matter how many wives and possessions he acquired he could not shake off that insecure depression that afflicts so many comedians.
The programme did not tell me anything I did not know but I was nonetheless absorbed by it.
