Customer Reviews
Fascinating study of a troubled comedy genius. - By: Simon T., 09 Oct 2008 
The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is, for me, an absorbing book detailing Sellers' life, career, insecurities, meanness & madness. If you are a fan, you may not like what you read here, but it is certainly compelling.
What comes across in every page is the author's frustration with his subject. Sellers was indeed a comedy genius with an incredibly timeless body of work behind him (The Goons, The Ladykillers, I'm Alright Jack, Dr Strangelove, the early Pink Panther films amongst many, many others) but Sellers was also prone to self destruction on a huge scale. Tantrums on sets, terrible movie choices (The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu anyone?) the calllous dismissal of lifelong friends, lovers & family - very few people, it seems, escaped unscathed from the wreckage of being part of Sellers' life.
There is light amongst the darkness here (Spike Milligan recounts a brilliantly funny tale of him travelling in the boot of Sellers' Rolls Royce to help him find out where a clunking noise was coming from) but more often than not Lewis paints Sellers as a very difficult man who ultimately squandered a great deal of his considerable talent.
Yes, this book could have done from a thorough edit, yes Lewis is often unfairly hard on his subject, & yes it's not an easy read, but for me, I've never read a more fascinating biography than this.
Disappointing and annoying - By: Gary H, 07 Apr 2008 
Despite its great length this is nowhere near a definitive biography. Incoherent, pretentious & ultimately exhausting it leaves so much unanswered.
Don't believe the dullards - By: Tony Floyd, 04 Jan 2006 I am gobsmacked at the low rating that this book has been given. I can only suppose that dullards want dull, colourless & unchalllenging books that don't upset their preconceptions or that don't say anything nasty about that terribly funny Inspector Clouseau. Well, don't believe the unhype, this one is utterly compelling, beautifully written & fascinatingly labyrinthine (this is a good thing).
Aren't you fed up of humdrum by-the-numbers biographies? The sort that just give you a dreary Gradgrindish recitation of facts: In 1963 he did this, then next year he did that & the year after he did some other things.
Lewis, who is tellingly name checked by Jonathan Coe in the acknowledgements to his superb biography of BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, is upfront about the selectivity of his biography, that it can only be one person's version of another person's life. Otherwise the danger is that the biographer (implicitly) says that this is the truth, the whole truth & the only truth.
It is obvious even from the lightweight books on Sellers, with their anecdotes about his penchant for pranks & practical jokes, his deliberate corpsing & aggravated improvisation & his obsession with cars & gadgets, that there was a very dark undertow of cruelty & disengagement in Seller's life. I think what has prompted some of the outraged comments about this book is the disparity it reveals between the onscreen characters & the offscreen man. Sellers is hardly a unique example of this phenomenon. But just because he was a comic actor it doesn't mean that in a biography alll we should get is a jolly Pink Pantherish romp through his life. Sellers was clearly a fascinating & complex man with many demons & pyschological, er, issues. This is precisely the stuff I want a biography to address.
Yes, Lewis is scathing about Sellers peronality flaws but this balanced by his brilliant dissection & celebration of Seller's talent & artistry, especiallly in his early film work. Surely the fascination of any notoriously 'difficult' artist is in endeavouring to uncover the extent to which the art is a result of, & an excuse for, the defects in their daily lives. The book is vast & there are countless diversions, tangents, tributaries & curiosities covered but this is not padding, it's vital in order to give a full expostion of the man & his times, circumstances, influences & so on.
I wouldn't claim to have been a huge Sellers fan before reading this book, but I was interested enough to want to read it, & having done so it has sharpened my appetite to track down many of his films that I haven't yet seen. What greater tribute is there to biographer & his subject?
difficult but great book on complex man - By: , 13 Sep 2005 
There have been many books about the late, great Peter Sellers over the years, but this biography takes the time & hassle to present the reader with a detailed & revealing portrait of a talented but troubled actor.
I do find the author's style of writng somewhat confusing sometimes;Roger Lewis seems to cover different incidents of Sellers's life alll at the same time.
However, I can quite easily overlook that minor quibble, as the text has been so brilliantly written & researched.
Both Peter Sellers's life & films are thoroughly examined, attempting to probe into the man.
The result is a picture of a man who claimed to have no inner self or personality of his own & became immersed in the art of characterizations.
The book is quite a challlenge to read, but please stick with it & enjoy a terrific biography about a terrific actor.
slighlty lacking in something - By: , 25 Jun 2005 i have indeed found this a very compelling book, but i have a few problems with it. first of alll, it gives you no sense the developement of his career. it just coprised of generallly unchronological anecdotes, which give little insight into the man himself. (of course roger lewis hasn't actuallly ever met him, so how could he). i find that once lewis gets onto a subject (a discussion of a film, for example) he sticks on it for about 7 pages. this becomes very tiring if you have seen the film, or met the person he is talking about (whatever the case may be). however i do recommend it, even if you find yourself skipping through vast chunks of it.
