British actor who first rose to fame on radio as the source of several
idiotic voices in The Goon Show, a national cult in the mid-1950s. It
was as an impersonator that he was most skilled, and it was sometimes
difficult to dissociate his skills as a mimic from his dramatic performance.
Even in I'm
All Right Jack (1959), where his satiric role as the Stalinist Fred
Kite brought him a British Academy Best Actor award, there is the sense
of Peter Sellers, the Goon, putting on a funny voice to 'do' a trade
unionist, just as he 'did' Asians in The
Millionairess (1960) and The Party (1968).
In the context of Stanley
Kubrick's Dr
Strangelove (1963), Sellers' mimicry in multiple roles works brilliantly,
but in the same director's Lolita
(1962) it simply pulls the film out of focus. His performance in the
dramatic role of Chance in Being There (1979) was well received critically,
but his lasting achievement may be the creation of Inspector Clouseau
in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series, a legendary comic creation whose
disastrously misplaced 'French' vowels have entered the vocabulary.
