PETER SELLERS’ WIDOW WINS ‘PANTHER’ SUIT

LONDON — Peter Sellers’ widow was awarded $1 million in damages Friday over a “Pink Panther” film assembled from the cutting-room floor after his death.

But Lynne Frederick failed to persuade a judge in the London high court to ban the film “Trail of the Pink Panther.”

Judge Charles Hobhouse awarded her the damages against United Artists, which made the film two years after Sellers died in 1980 using discarded clips from five earlier “Panther” films.

Frederick sued United Artists and film director Blake Edwards saying: “It was an appalling film: Not a tribute to my husband but an insult to his memory.”

Sellers, 54 when he died, created his most enduring comic character in the Pink Panther films, playing the bungling French detective Inspector Clouseau.