The Life and Death of Peter Sellers 2004

Geoffrey Rush portrays Peter Sellers, opening the film with the comedian stepping toward a director’s chair as an unseen audience erupts into applause and the camera lingers on his gaze toward the movie of his life.

Set in 1950s London, the story traces Sellers’s ascent from a radio comic on The Goon Show to a figure who can inhabit a widening array of personalities on screen. After a setback at an audition, he returns home to a controlling mother, Peg; Miriam Margolyes plays this fierce, pushy matriarch who spurs him to “bite the hand that feeds you.” With renewed purpose, Sellers discovers his talent for impersonation, crafting a late breakthrough as the aging World War I veteran he had once auditioned to become. The moment arrives when a casting agent who previously rejected him recognizes his fit for the part and finally grants him the chance he’s fought for, signaling the film’s first big transformation from son to showman to surrogate father.

The emotional core deepens as the film moves through a brisk succession of roles. After the triumph of winning a British Academy Award for I’m All Right Jack, Peg and Bill Sellers watch the moment from the wings, only to have Peg’s skepticism and Bill’s quiet pride pull the father-and-son dynamic into focus. The narrative then pivots: Sellers slips into the persona of his own father, speaking in a heavy Yorkshire accent and breaking the fourth wall to reveal how childhood shaped the man before us.

Back on set, the film’s mood shifts toward ambition and desire. While filming The Millionairess, Sellers becomes enamored with his on-screen partner Sophia Loren, a fixation that unsettles the stability of his home life. As the romance grows more complicated, he purchases a house in central London to place himself closer to the whirlwind of celebrity and longing. To ease the guilt of his infidelity, he enlists a decorator, Peter Gevisser as Ted Levy, and invites his wife and the decorator to share a drink together, then abandons the scene to pursue his passion in a reckless weekend with Loren.

A chance encounter with Italy’s Carlo Ponti on set intensifies the fissure in Sellers’s personal life. The film catches a charged moment as he distracts himself with Sophia’s stand-in, and the affair that follows becomes a flashpoint for the unraveling of his marriage. When Anne confronts him about the distance between them, the tension erupts into a pivotal scene on the balcony where he threatens to jump if she leaves. The second major transformation follows: Sellers enters a period of disguise and self-doubt, this time in the guise of Anne, dubbing over the breakup to maintain appearances.

The story then threads Sellers through a sequence of actors’ worlds. He spends time in Peg’s care, where a clairvoyant named Maurice Woodruff—Stephen Fry—offers guidance that leads him toward a new phase of his career, this time as the Pink Panther series becomes a runaway success. Yet the triumph feels hollow to him as he re-enters England to face the death of his father, Bill, who dies after a moment of quiet pride in his son. Peg’s influence is called into question, and the bond between mother and son is strained beyond repair, setting the stage for even more dramatic changes.

At the Dorchester Hotel, Sellers is wooed by a new kind of dream: a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Tucci embodies Kubrick in a sequence that places the director’s signature stare at the center of Sellers’s world, underscoring the film’s meditation on how a performer becomes a vessel for others’ visions. Peg visits the onslaught of a career crossroads, but Sellers finds himself drawn away from the expectations of both wife and mother toward a new romance with his next collaborator and potential life partner, Britt Ekland. Charlize Theron embodies Britt as Sellers courts a new kind of happiness and begins weaving a life that could stand apart from the chaos of the old one.

The marriage to Britt continues amid Hollywood lights and heartbreaks. A hospital scare—eight heart attacks sparked by amyl nitrite while on honeymoon—shatters the illusion of invincibility and triggers a surreal dreamscape in which his many characters crowd the consciousness of his dying self. When he wakes, a renewed sense of risk returns: his next project, Casino Royale, is treated with suspicion by all involved, and he tries to approach it with greater seriousness, only to face resistance from every corner of his entourage.

Pregnancy changes the family again: Britt bears a child, but Sellers’s stubborn unwillingness to grow his family further tests their relationship. The baby’s presence disrupts ongoing shoots and deepens the emotional rift he feels toward the life he’s built. The fourth narrative twist arrives as a surrogate “Peg” emerges within him, defending his own behavior even as the real Peg’s memory weighs heavily on his judgment. The power of memory, regret, and the past presses in as he navigates a chorus of voices from the corners of his career.

A late-life reckoning arrives with Maurice Woodruff’s influence and a stubborn devotion to Being There, a book that embodies the ideal life Sellers longs to build on screen. He chases a film version of the book, but Woodruff steers him toward The Pink Panther Strikes Again, nudging him toward a different destiny. A messy, boozy screening ends with a drunken, uninhibited speech, and a quiet, lonely walk through his own home movies as the adult son he barely recognizes calls to offer encouragement from afar. The film keeps moving, and the final transformation—into Blake Edwards, the man who would train him and push him through the last, iconic moments of his screen life—hums along with a measured, rueful grace.

Scenes from Being There become a throughline in Sellers’s mind as he constructs the look of Chance while simultaneously destroying what remains of his memorabilia. The story loops back to the stark winter of the Swiss Alps, where he lingers at a snow-lit doorway, watching Blake Edwards emerge with the script for The Romance of the Pink Panther. The moment crystallizes the film’s central question: a man who wore so many faces—yet remained essentially solitary—can ever fully become the person he’s pretending to be.

In the end, the film returns to its opening image: the same Peter Sellers who started this journey sits in the director’s chair, shrugging as the crew and set pieces swirl around him. He walks through the labyrinth of film sets toward a quiet, sunlit trailer, a final, knowing smile lifting the corners of his lips as he faces the camera and declares, You can’t come in here.

You can’t come in here.