Peter Sellers, one of the greatest comedians of all time, whom we are getting ready to salute this year at A Summer Night Festival with three unforgettable films, sadly did not have a life as funny and ‘pink’ as his films.

Peter Sellers was born in 1925 in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, the second child of a pianist father and an actress mother. His real name was Richard Henry, but his family always called him Peter, the name they had given to their previous child, whom they had lost in infancy, and he was known by that name throughout his life.

Born to a Protestant father and a Jewish mother, Sellers attended St. Aloysius College, a Catholic school, where he discovered that he was a Jew and someone who had no confusion when it came to faith.

At 15, he started working at a theater as a janitor. At the theater, where he eventually rose to lighting operator, he also began acting and singing. He became the drummer in a band called Joe Daniels and His Hot Shots. During World War II he volunteered for service and went to India and Myanmar as an airman in the Royal Air Force. Returning to England when the war ended in 1945, he went looking for work and began doing stand-up shows in music halls.

After a number of short films, in 1951 he appeared in his first feature, the black-and-white comedy “Penny Points to Paradise”. That same year he started the groundbreaking BBC radio comedy “The Goon Show”, in which he, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine became a legendary team. He kept this legendary program going until 1960; it would deeply influence much later British comedy, from Monty Python to Mr. Bean.

His real breakthrough came with the role of the dogmatic trade unionist Fred Kite in John Boulting’s BAFTA-winning comedy “I’m All Right Jack” (1959). His superb comic talent carried him to leading roles in many films in the 1960s.

In 1962, in Stanley Kubrick’s Nobakov adaptation “Lolita” (1962), he also proved his dramatic skill in the role of Clare Quilty, a mentally unstable man with multiple personalities. This astonishing performance carried him to Kubrick’s next film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, which brought him his first Oscar nomination. Sellers thus became the first actor in Academy Awards history to be nominated in a single category for playing more than one character in the same film.

In 1963, together with Blake Edwards, the director he fought with most in his career and worked with just as often, he made “The Pink Panther”, launching one of the most entertaining series in film history. The role of the clumsy, well-meaning French Inspector Jacques Clouseau, originally conceived as a supporting character, was so beloved that the series came to be known by this character and his name. The film made waves all over the world, and the second installment followed without delay a year later. “A Shot in the Dark” (1964) brought Clouseau and Sellers to the lead, and the film became the most beloved of the series.

In the 1960s, in a world where everything British was popular, from the Beatles to the James Bond films, all eyes were on Sellers when it came to comedy. In 1964, at the height of his career, the drugs he was taking led to a near-fatal heart attack. When he came to, he said he had seen “Heaven” and met an angel who told him it was not yet his time to die.

When this first attack came, he was working on Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid” (1964). In a move he would later regret, Wilder, rather than halting the project, replaced Sellers with Ray Walston. The actor soon recovered completely and returned to film sets.

Although the 1965 film he starred in, “What’s New Pussycat,” was a huge success, working with Sellers was becoming increasingly difficult. In 1968, he refused to star in “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), which Bud Yorkin was to direct, and was furious that the producers went ahead with Alan Arkin in his place. Disputes with the production company also escalated, so much so that although the Bond film “Casino Royale” (1967), in which he played Evelyn Tremble, was a box-office hit, Sellers was blamed for its costs.

In 1968 he reunited with Blake Edwards, from whom he had parted on bad terms, saying ‘I’ll never work with him again,’ for their first and only film without the ‘Pink Panther’: “The Party”. Shot almost entirely through improvisation, this unique comedy proved to the whole world just how limitless Sellers’s talent was.

By 1970, with his career in serious decline, Sellers began appearing in minor comedies and showing up more often on television. Inspector Clouseau came to his rescue: “The Return of the Pink Panther” (1975), made once again with Blake Edwards, was a big box-office earner in the year “Jaws” was a hit. Coming 11 years later, this sequel marked the return of both the Blake Edwards – Peter Sellers – Henry Mancini partnership and the Pink Panther cartoon character and Pink Panther diamond. Next came the most fantastical of the Pink Panther films, “The Pink Panther Strikes Again” (1976), and “Revenge of the Pink Panther” (1978).

Especially in the mid-1970s, his physical and mental health steadily deteriorated amid ongoing alcohol and drug problems. As his behavior on set became more uncontrolled and difficult, the actor began to clash frequently with directors and fellow actors. Because he stopped taking his heart medication, he never fully recovered from the attack he had suffered in 1964. In March 1977 he narrowly survived another major attack, and the pacemaker fitted to regulate his heartbeat caused him further mental and physical discomfort. Yet he always refused to slow down his work schedule or to undergo the heart surgery that might have extended his life by a few years.

In his private life, too, he was a difficult, domineering and jealous man; he married four times, and in an interview he said of himself: “If I can’t find a way to live with myself, I shouldn’t expect someone else to live with me.” Actress Britt Ekland, his second wife, speaking about their troubled marriage in the BBC Arts documentary “Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy”, said Sellers was extremely controlling and mentally unstable: “He clearly suffered from bipolar, or was seriously bipolar. He was a very tortured soul who should have had more help. Instead, he was too helpless to get help, because he was such a valuable asset.”

On “The Muppet Show,” where he was a guest in 1977, when Kermit told Sellers, who couldn’t decide which disguise to wear, “There’s no need to stress, we’re backstage; you can be yourself here,” the actor’s reply was, “I could never be myself, Kermit.”

In 1979 he brought his most cherished dream project to life, starring in the adaptation of a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, a writer he greatly admired: “Being There”. Directed by Hal Ashby, with a production process that took seven years, the film earned Sellers his second Oscar nomination.

In 1980, while preparing to star in “Romance of the Pink Panther”, he was also making plans to revive “The Goon Show”. However, on July 22 he was hospitalized after suffering a major heart attack in his hotel room and remained in a coma for more than 30 hours. One of his doctors said that Sellers never regained consciousness after being admitted and that, although he did not go into cardiac arrest, in his last two hours his heartbeat literally “faded away.” He died in his hospital bed just after midnight on July 24, 1980, at the age of 54.

After Sellers’s death, Blake Edwards’s attempts to revive the Pink Panther resulted in two films in the 1980s. Dedicated to him by Edwards with the words “To Peter Sellers, the one and only Inspector Clouseau…”, “Trail of the Pink Panther” (1982) was completed using unused scenes from the previous Pink Panther film. Edwards’s attempts to make a ‘Pink Panther’ without Sellers continued with disappointing films such as “Curse of the Pink Panther” (1983) and “Son of the Pink Panther” (1993).

In 1996, in a dumpster outside the door of the Park Lane Films company, two lost short films starring Peter Sellers were found: “Dearth of a Salesman” and “Insomnia is Good For You”. Made in 1957, these 30-minute short comedies were screened for the first time in 2013 at the Southend Film Festival.

His controversial life became the subject of documentaries such as “The Unknown Peter Sellers” (2000), “Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers” (2001), “There Used to Be a Me” (2021) and “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” (2018). “The Ghost of Peter Sellers” told the story of what happened during the making of “Ghost in the Noonday Sun”, a pirate film released in 1974 to harsh reviews. Turned into a documentary years later in the hands of the film’s director, Peter Medak, this ‘adventure’ recounted how Sellers first fired the producers and then turned his back on his friend Peter Medak, trying to sabotage the film.

In 2004, Geoffrey Rush played the actor in the TV film “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”. Winner of Golden Globe and Emmy awards, the film was adapted from Roger Lewis’s book of the same name, built on interviews with members of the Sellers family.

On Premiere magazine’s list of “The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time,” he ranked 49th for his role in “Being There,” 67th for Clouseau and 75th for Dr. Strangelove. He was also 84th on Empire magazine’s 1997 list of “The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time.”

Although he himself believed he ‘did not exist,’ we salute this legendary actor, who left countless characters in our memories, with three of his films at this year’s A Summer Night Festival. Directed by Blake Edwards with music composed by Henry Mancini, “The Pink Panther” (1963), “A Shot in the Dark” (1964) and “The Party” (1968) will meet audiences in Türkiye for the first time in their restored versions.