Getting under Sellers' skin

By PETER CALDER

To reincarnate the legendary British comedian Peter Sellers, Australian actor Geoffrey Rush had to endure hours in the makeup chair so elements of Sellers could be carefully applied to his exterior. But he says the real challenge in making the movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was getting a sense of the famous man's interior life

You said somewhere that you never saw this as a career-enhancing gig.

I took it on with a note to self: be prepared to fall flat on your face. And there was a certain foolhardiness to taking it on because I'd originally turned it down [as] the shoes were just too big to fill. But after a while I thought that the real-life characters I had played - David Helfgott or de Sade or even the father in Swimming Upstream - they're still just characters. You've got to come up with a person who sets up a contract with the audience for those two hours.

To the same extent as any fictional character?

To a degree. People have different expectations because with Sellers there are so many mannerisms that people expect you to deliver, so you have to work on them. Certainly in those moments when we recreate scenes from his public life and his films, we wanted to go full throttle, to make them the thrilling moments, the "stunt" sequences, if you like. For the rest you have to invent things because you don't know what went on in the privacy of the bedroom or kids' playrooms. In any case, it's not a documentary. It's a fanciful speculation that tries to get inside his head.

What would have to have happened for you to judge that you had fallen flat on your face?

Well, the problem was really whether I looked right. When the first rough cut was screened, my worry was whether I looked young enough when I need to look young [Rush, 52, plays Sellers as young as 30] and what was the makeup like. They are two areas where you go into a vortex of self-doubt. I know that I don't really look like Peter Sellers. I'm physically taller and more gaunt, not as hairy. I'm held together by glue in some scenes - wig and stick-on eyebrows, contact lenses, silicon cheeks to make me chubbier. You didn't want to sneeze.

Was it tough to act with all that on?

Not really, because the prosthetics are so extraordinarily sophisticated now. But there was also a lot of evolution ... of the makeup because we tried to find a balance so you don't lose the actor who's generating the performance. I decided I would be Geoffrey Rush in the role of Peter Sellers.

What do you think of Sellers as a bloke? Do you like him?

I don't know. In some ways his unknowability is still his great appeal. I've spoken to a lot of people who knew him well, his last agent for example, who said "People tell me about the dark, dangerous side of Peter's personality; I've never seen it. I see a gentlemanly, courteous, whimsical and funny guy."

But I think he was all sorts of people: Strangelove and Clouseau and James Bond. His son Michael says his dad was most like Chance the Gardener in Being There, and I think he meant that he was much simpler than people thought. I like the way Spike Milligan described Sellers as a complex simpleton. That really nails it.

He felt more comfortable in the playful world of creating those characters than he did being alone with himself. I think a lot of actors feel that. You get a bit restless if you're not on a job and you feel you're not interesting. Sellers always said if they made a film of his life it would be very dull.

The film seems to have upset the family much more than the book [the Roger Lewis biography of the same name on which it is based].

That's the power of the British tabloid press. In the lead-up to the release at Cannes there were a lot of stories about how the family was so upset. But many of them zeroed in on how particularly Sellers' son Michael didn't like the book. A lot of people didn't; they found it too disturbing and editorially sour. John Cleese declined to be involved in the production because, he said, "I didn't like that book at all, but what do you expect from a British journalist?" But subsequently the family have seen the film and they have been more than generous about it. I told them it must have been hard to see some Antipodean thespian with a lot of latex on his face prancing round impersonating somebody they loved. But interestingly, Sellers' granddaughter Emily, who's 15, said to me that she loved the film because it made her feel how he must have felt when he was low and I thought: "Damn, that's the best review I could have."

The director, Stephen Hopkins, said he cast you because you were "good at playing loons".

He made that comment at a press conference announcing the project and of course the British press, who revere Sellers and are very protective of him, took it straight to Michael [who condemned it]. We've learned to live with that one and certainly there was never any intention - it would be fatal as an actor in that role - to say: "I'm going to show you what a bastard he was."

What is it with all these loons you play?

Well, I've done, what is it, 19 films and that's three. But I can join them up by saying they are all artists.

And was Peter a loon?

He may have endured a multiple personality disorder that hasn't been classified. But it was also part of his identity: the man of a thousand faces, who wouldn't go on Parkinson unless he could be a Nazi. I don't know if he was mad. He was ... never given the normal parameters of a child. So he wasn't able to deal with fame when it came.

LOWDOWN

WHO: Peter Sellers, brilliant but complex comedian

BORN: September 8, 1925, Southsea, England. Died July 24, 1980

KEY ROLES: Being There (1979), The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Party (1968), Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Pink Panther (1963), I'm All Right Jack (1959), The Ladykillers (1955)

TRIVIA: In '64 Sellers was the first male to appear on Playboy's cover