Stalking a chameleon

Life, as it turns out, was the death of Peter Sellers.

There was the charming, talented public Sellers, jet-setting through a starlet-drenched world. And there was the irrational, abusive, self-loathing private Sellers, who all too often left his charming self at the front door. A complicated comic genius -- both tortured and torturer -- he would die in 1980 of a heart attack at 54 at the top, and the bottom, of his game.

“The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” starring Geoffrey Rush attempts to follow and make sense of the various strands of that life in a daring HBO film, which begins airing Dec. 5.

“He was one of the original jet set,” said director Stephen Hopkins on set last summer, “almost like a comedic version of the Beatles. He was cool, he dressed great, he had fabulous cars. In his heyday, there weren’t as many celebrities as there are now, but there was this hard core of people who had yachts and planes -- Sellers, Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski and a few others.

“People saw him in films as this wounded, harmless creature. He comes across as this sad clown, fighting for his dignity.”

Sellers’ unconventional life seemed to cry out for an unconventional narrative, and writers Stephen McFeely and Chris Markus came up with the notion of a film within a film.

“It’s a complicated idea,” said Hopkins. “It’s like after Peter’s death, he’s making a film of his life -- and he’s making it the way he wants it to be seen, so from time to time he stops the action and becomes other people.” Hopkins paused for comic effect. “It’s all about wigs, really.”

Actually it’s all about being mutable. Australian actor Rush over the course of just a few days had to morph into a series of the characters that defined Sellers’ career: a mad Nazi scientist in “Dr. Strangelove,” the bumbling French Inspector Clouseau in the “Pink Panther” films, a matador in a spangled suit of lights in “The Bobo” -- and the role that arguably he loved most, a melancholy-looking man wearing a homburg hat and a blank gaze in “Being There.”

The script calls for Rush to not only play Sellers’ characters but Sellers himself and Sellers portraying people who were close to him, including his parents.

Which takes us to the heart of the film itself, which is really about Sellers’ eerie ability to lose himself in his roles.

In one scene he tells a reporter: “I have no personality of my own. There used to be a me behind the mask, but I had it surgically removed. If I didn’t have characters like Clouseau, I don’t know who I’d be.”

This made huge demands on Rush as a leading man, but he is buttressed by a strong supporting cast -- Charlize Theron as Sellers’ second wife, Swedish actress Britt Ekland; Emily Watson as his first wife, Anne; John Lithgow as Blake Edwards, director of the “Pink Panther” films; and Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick, who directed “Dr. Strangelove.”

At Shepperton Studios near London, Rush was close to the end of a long shooting day, playing Sellers playing Chauncey Gardiner, the sad-faced empty vessel in “Being There.” He spoke of Sellers as an unlikely A-lister: “He was totally hip in the 1960s. And to be 38 and hip back then was an achievement. I remember John Lennon saying he didn’t want to be a Beatle at 35. Because 35 felt as if you’d be dead, wearing tweed suits, pullovers and slippers.

“He was in an exclusive club of people with the glamour and money to be able to fly to St. Tropez for lunch, then go on to Milan for something in the evening. This was before people traveled as much as they do now.”

Unraveling the layers

One of the challenges Rush faced in playing Sellers was pinning down the actor’s complex character. He said he discussed this with two of Sellers’ agents. Marty Baum, who represented him in the last four years of his life, had found him “congenial, gentlemanly and amusing.” But Sellers’ agent from an earlier, less-fruitful period told Rush there was “this constant sense of danger” around him: “Things were liable to go haywire.”

The film is partly based on a rather sour 1997 biography of the same name by British author Roger Lewis, who relentlessly details the actor’s eccentricities, mood swings, callousness toward his children, and general volatility and unpredictability. (His son Michael wrote an acerbic biography of Sellers, who effectively disinherited his children at the time of his death, leaving almost all of his estate to his fourth wife, Lynne Frederick.)

“People were shocked or disturbed by that book,” said Rush. “They couldn’t believe this great clown and wonderful character actor had such a turbulent private life on so many fronts. But there’s other source material for this film. I talked to people who knew him and tried to feed in as many contradictory opinions as I could. I feel your task as an actor is not to put an editorial attitude on to a character or say, ‘I’ll play this guy as a depressive misfit with bad anger-management skills.’ Inevitably it has to be a richer and more complex scenario than that.”

If it was hard for Rush to pin down the actor’s psychological complexities, the physical aspects of the role were truly arduous. The script requires Sellers to be in almost every scene, so Rush was constantly on call. And the various guises employed by Sellers meant that Rush spent long hours -- at least three a day -- in makeup, according to those on set. It took six hours to prepare him to look like “Being There’s” Gardiner using facial prosthetics. And because Sellers gained and lost weight rapidly at various stages in his life, Rush often wore a “fat suit” beneath his clothes.

It makes you wonder: Why take on the role? Indeed Rush initially turned it down, in 2001. “It seemed one of those fantasy scripts where you thought, ‘It’s a great read, but no one could ever make this. It’s logistically too complicated, and in a funny way, untouchable. It would be shameful to try and impersonate an actor who had such extraordinary chameleon gifts, knowing you would never be as good as him.’ ”

‘The thrill of the hunt’

Various directors were attached to the project, and at one point British comic and actor Steve Coogan (“Around the World in 80 Days”) seemed likely to take the Sellers role. But HBO came back to Rush after a year and he changed his mind. “I thought I needed a sense of danger and challenge, and as a middle-aged character actor, it’s not a huge repertoire of stuff that comes your way. I thought, ‘Take a risk. Be prepared to fall flat on your face. If you do, it’ll bomb and no one will see it, so it’ll be fine. But if you don’t go for it, you’re never going to know the thrill of the hunt.’ ”

The film takes pains to acknowledge Sellers as a huge celebrity who moved in fashionable circles. One day of filming took place at a large, handsome mansion amid green English countryside in Oxfordshire, which doubles for Sellers’ home. The scene being staged was his 1964 marriage to Ekland, and among the extras playing guests were look-alikes resembling Lennon, Mick Jagger and Michael Caine. Rush, taller and slimmer than Sellers but looking uncannily like him, with horn-rimmed glasses halfway down his nose, dashed among the wedding guests, posing for pictures in Sellers’ “you must laugh, you must love me, I hate you” way.

Before arriving on set, Rush felt he needed a long stretch of time to immerse himself in researching Sellers’ life. Fortunately, it was available to him, on the set of “Pirates of the Caribbean” (in which he played Barbossa), when he worked “for two weeks here and there during a five-month shoot.” He spent his downtime studying the era of British vaudeville and music halls in which Sellers grew up as well as his groundbreaking work with the anarchic radio comedy trio the Goons in the 1950s.

Like Rush, Theron agreed to take a role in the film because of the screenplay’s intriguing structure. At the end of another shooting day the actress, dressed in a box-cut, candy-striped blouse, Capri pants and flip-flops, said: “What I liked about the script is, it’s not your typical biopic. It doesn’t go from A to B. When you watch Peter Sellers movies, there’s an unpredictable quality to them, which this script has. Yesterday we shot the film within his ‘After the Fox’ film, so it was a film within a film within a film.”

Given Theron’s rising film career, it seems odd for her to take a supporting role in a TV movie. “It’s more important to me to be surrounded by creative, talented people, so if the material’s brilliant and it comes in a small package, why not?” she said.

Hopkins points out that this is a script designed for adults. “Most cinema is aimed at children and teenagers, and most good American drama now is on TV, I think. I never felt HBO wanted to water this down or make it less edgy or difficult. It’s interesting, trying to get inside someone who on the outside seems really unlikable.”

That, according to Rush, summarizes the balancing act he needed to perform to play Sellers.

“I never wanted to play him as a mean-spirited man,” he said, “but rather someone frustrated by the mysterious talent he’d been given, his fear that he might not be able to honor that, and his fear that he might lose it. So he made big demands on himself and the people around him.

“You could see his life in a lot of ways. I look upon it as a quest for happiness.”