Sellers' versatility enabled him to portray a wide range of comic characters using different accents and guises, and he would often assume multiple roles within the same film, frequently with contrasting temperaments and styles.

[6] Sellers was two weeks old when he was carried on stage by Dick Henderson, the headline act at the Kings Theatre in Southsea: the crowd sang "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow", which caused the infant to cry.

[34] In March 1948 Sellers gained a six-week run at the Windmill Theatre in London, which predominantly staged revue acts: he provided the comedy turns in between the nude shows on offer.

[39] In October 1948, Sellers was a regular radio performer, appearing in Starlight Hour, The Gang Show, Henry Hall's Guest Night and It's Fine To Be Young.

[61] He accepted a larger part in the 1955 Alexander Mackendrick-directed Ealing comedy The Ladykillers in which he starred opposite his idol Alec Guinness, in addition to Herbert Lom and Cecil Parker.

[65] In 1957 film producer Michael Relph, impressed with Sellers' portrayal of an elderly character in Idiot Weekly, cast the 32-year-old actor as a 68-year-old projectionist in Basil Dearden's The Smallest Show on Earth, supporting Bill Travers, Virginia McKenna and Margaret Rutherford.

[68] Later in 1957 Sellers portrayed a television star with a talent for disguises in Mario Zampi's offbeat black comedy The Naked Truth, opposite Terry-Thomas, Peggy Mount, Shirley Eaton and Dennis Price.

[75] Next, Sellers featured with Terry-Thomas as one of a pair of comic villains in George Pal's Tom Thumb (1958), a musical fantasy film, opposite Russ Tamblyn, Jessie Matthews and Peter Butterworth.

[92] In 1960, Sellers portrayed an Indian doctor, Dr Ahmed el Kabir, in Anthony Asquith's romantic comedy The Millionairess, a film based on a George Bernard Shaw play of the same name.

[114] Writing in The Sunday Times, Dilys Powell commented that Sellers gave "a firework performance, funny, malicious, only once for a few seconds overreaching itself, and in the murder scene which is both prologue and epilogue achieving the macabre in comedy.

After his father's death in October 1962, Sellers decided to leave England and was approached by director Blake Edwards who offered him the role of Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther, after Peter Ustinov had backed out of the film.

[122] The Pink Panther was released in the UK in January 1964[128] and received a mixed reception from the critics,[129] although Penelope Gilliatt, writing in The Observer, remarked that Sellers had a "flawless sense of mistiming" in a performance that was "one of the most delicate studies in accident-proneness since the silents".

[133] In 1963, Stanley Kubrick cast Sellers to appear in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb alongside George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and Slim Pickens.

[155] Shortly after the wedding, Sellers started filming on location in Twentynine Palms, California, for Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, opposite Dean Martin and Kim Novak.

[157] On the night of 5 April 1964, prior to having sex with Ekland, Sellers inhaled amyl nitrite (poppers) as a sexual stimulant in his search for "the ultimate orgasm",[158] and suffered a series of eight heart attacks over the course of three hours as a result.

[163] Sellers had been concerned that his heart attacks might have caused brain damage[162] and that he would be unable to remember his lines, but he was reassured that his memory and abilities were unimpaired after the experience of filming.

[164] Sellers followed this with the role of the perverted Austrian psychoanalyst Doctor Fritz Fassbender in Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat?, appearing alongside Peter O'Toole, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss and Ursula Andress.

[196] After a cameo appearance in A Day at the Beach (1970),[197] and a serious role later in 1970 as an ageing businessman who seduces Sinéad Cusack in Hoffman,[198] Sellers starred in Roy Boulting's There's a Girl in My Soup opposite Goldie Hawn.

[222] The turning point in Sellers' flailing career came in 1974, when he re-teamed with Blake Edwards to star in The Return of the Pink Panther, alongside Christopher Plummer, Herbert Lom and Catherine Schell.

[229] Biographer Roger Lewis documents that of Sellers' four wives, Frederick was the most poorly treated; Julian Upton likened it to a boxing match between a heavyweight and a featherweight, a relationship that "oscillated from ardour to hatred, reconciliation and remorse".

Julian Upton expressed the view that the strain behind the scenes began to manifest itself in the sluggish pace of the film, describing it as a "laboured, stunt-heavy hotchpotch of half-baked ideas and rehashed gags".

Upon its release in May 1979, the film was well received; Janet Maslin of The New York Times observed how Sellers divided "his energies between a serious character and a funny one, but that it was his serious performance which was more impressive".

[239] Later in 1979, Sellers starred opposite Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas and Jack Warden in the black comedy Being There as Chance, a simple-minded gardener addicted to watching TV who is regarded as a sage by the rich and powerful.

[242] Sellers considered Chance's walking and voice the character's most important attributes, and in preparing for the role worked alone with a tape recorder or with his wife, and then with Ashby, to perfect the clear enunciation and flat delivery needed to reveal "the childlike mind behind the words".

[254] Tom Shales of The Washington Post described the film as "an indefensibly inept comedy",[255] adding that "it is hard to name another good actor who ever made so many bad movies as Sellers, a comedian of great gifts but ferociously faulty judgment.

Sellers and Mr. Lom are such a hilarious team, though it may be because each is a fine comic actor with a special talent for portraying the sort of all-consuming, epic self-absorption that makes slapstick farce initially acceptable—instead of alarming—and finally so funny.

[288] Author Aaron Sultanik observed that in Sellers' early films, such as I'm All Right Jack, he displays "deft, technical interpretations [that] pinpoint the mechanical nature of his comic characterization", which "reduces each of his characters to a series of gross, awkward tics".

[290][j] Critic Tom Milne saw a change over Sellers' career and thought that his "comic genius as a character actor was ... stifled by his elevation to leading man" and his later films suffered as a result.

By chance he ordered cockles for lunch and the smell brought back a memory of the seaside town of Morecambe: this gave him "the idea of a faded North Country accent and the suggestion of a scrappy moustache".

[295] Sellers and The Goon Show were a strong influence on the Monty Python performers,[296] with John Cleese calling him "the greatest voice man of all time", adding, "If he could listen to you for five minutes, he could do a perfect impersonation of you.