I love most of Peter Sellers work, and I decided to read a bio on him called "Mister Strangelove" by Ed Sikov, and I found out he was a working jazz drummer during the war years:
But the title of the book should tell you about the man himself. He was crazy,crazy, crazy CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The author said that the reason why he took to the drums was because Sellers had no identity himself. He was just an obsessive impersonator, and PS the person didn't exist, so the drums were such an abstract thing, that he loved to bang the crap out of them. He stopped being a professional jazz drummer, because some guy wanted the band to play some tune, and he didn't know it. The guy called him a shiface because he didn't know the tune, and he decided that any profession that involved being treated like that was not for him. He was a Mommy's boy, who was so attached to his Jewish mother that even when she died, he still would talk to her at night. He was married four times, and expected his wives to take care of him like his mother did, and when they didn't, he would throw objects at them,and they or he would have to leave the house for days or weeks, or even months!
He would have crazy reactions to things, and wind up telling women that he wanted to marry them the first time he met them. he would have a director fired if they told him to follow the script, because he had to improvise most of his lines in all his movies. Dr. Strangelove-improvisation, Lolita-improvisation, Pink Panther movies-improvisation- the man was a comedic genius! He would at first turn down any movie that was offered to him until he could spend time with his tape recorder, taping different accents and listening to them over and over again until he decided he would take the roles, because he could do the accent he wanted to use for the film.
He would fire anyone on the set who would wear the color purple, because he was afraid and/or hated the color purple! He was definitely bi-polar, and would threaten to commit suicide countless times if he got the feeling that his wives didn't love him like his mother did.
He cared about things more than people- especially cars, new expensive cars. In just six years, he went through 50 different cars, because he would see a new one and immediately yell out "I've gotta have it!" We're talking Bentley's, Rolls Royces, Ferraries, Jaguars. He would give cars away as presents if he liked you, or he would insist on being given a new Rolls Royce or he wouldn't take a role. He got interested in photography, and would make home movies where he would tell his wives and kids to smile and laugh as if they were having a good time, when they were really miserable. Phony home movies
He was going to marry Liza Minnelli, but she knocked off his toupee at a restaurant, and after months of dating her and proposing to her, he walked out of the restaurant and never saw her again for the rest of his life. He walked out on "Casino Royale" because
Sellers had four heart attacks in one day and was clinically dead until they installed a primitive pace marker in him. Rather than go to a hospital and get an angiogram, he would rather wear his pacemaker all the time, and wound up dying at 55 in early 1980 of another heart attack. He trusted psychics and numerologists more than he trusted his doctors. I could go on, but you get the idea. The reason none of this was public knowledge was because of one piece of advice he was given by Alec Guinness when PS was a young man. "Son", he told him, "whatever you do, NEVER talk to a journalist". He followed that advice most of his life, but at the end, he was so far gone, he couldn't shut up, and got himself into a lot of trouble....
_forumlogo.png.a607ef20a6e0c299ab2aa6443aa1f32e.png)
Rare
Rare
Rare
Rare
Rare
