Peter Sellers 1925-1980

PETER SELLERS died after his ninth heart attack. Even cats have only nine lives, and cats aren't funny. Cats don't know how to wear trench-coats and perky little fedoras and speak English with a horrendously bad French accent. Come to think of it, cats don't know how to speak English at all.

Peter Sellers spoke English, of course. He spoke 20 dialects of British English; and in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, he used 3 different Southern accents. He knew how to say "rhume" instead of "room," and "minkey" rather than "monkey." He knew that it was funny to fall into a moat with his clothes on. And he knew that it wasn't really funny for him to play the president of the United States and say, "You can't fight here--this is the War Room."

"As far as I'm aware, I have no personality of my own whatsoever," Sellers once said. For a guy with no personality, he had a lot of chutzpah. Somewhere within himself, he found a way to play Dr. Strange love and Henry Orient and Inspector Clouseau. And finally, Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-weaned hero of Being There.

History will make a big fuss over Being There, because it was Sellers' last--and perhaps best--film. But for him, it was simply the closest he could come to perfection, to playing the self he didn't think existed. Chauncey Gardiner was just a man who loved a gadget: TV.

Sellers loved gadgets, too. He once owned a garage laid with 500 feet of model railroad track. He bought more than 50 cars in his day, and loved his Rolls-Royce as much as the next guy. His prized toy was a life-sized mechanical elephant.

Not that he rode the elephant for sport. To stay in shape, Sellers did a stint as vice-president of the London Judo Club and was never one to skip a few innings at the Marylbone Cricket Club. But soon the heart attacks started coming, the first in 1964, and then nearly every other year until Tuesday night, when his heart simply deteriorated. He slipped into a coma while lunching at the Dorchester Hotel and died four hours later.

HE NEVER LET ANYONE near him. "Behind our masks, we clowns lead very sad lives," he once confessed, and his private life was varied if not sad. Sellers stood four times beneath the nuptial tier, never with a girl over 23. There was Anne, Britt, Miranda, and finally Lynne, who never got to say goodbye to her husband before he boarded the jet for the big cutting room in the sky.

Few knew that he was an expert photographer, that he was fast approaching his 55th birthday, that he was hard at work on a sixth Pink Panther film that would earn him $8 million. But all that wasn't really important.

Peter Sellars was a perfectionist. He wanted to get the voice right, and then figure out the character. He wanted to poke fun at people but he wanted to say something at the same time. His 1950s radio series, "The Goon Show," The Mouse That Roared, Dr. Strangelove, and Being There did just that. They let him be "ridiculing without being ridiculous; serious without being solemn."