About the Book:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Peter Sellers has been acknowledged as one of the screen's greatest actors and one of the best publicized stars. This book looks at the life of Sellers by working from interviews with his family, wives, girlfriends, and co-stars. In his acclaimed biography The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, veteran journalist Roger Lewis tells the story of this only son of a Jewish mother and father who worked in a touring theatre company. Conscripted into the Royal Airforce during World War II, he began performing in Ralph Reader's Gang Shows. Then after the war he met Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, and together they created the Goon Show.

Roger Lewis, in this no-holds-barred biography, exposes a Peter Sellers the world little knows. Recognized as the greatest British comic since Charlie Chaplin, Sellers was the grand master of fifty-five films – from Dr. Strangelove, to Being There, and the Pink Panther series of hits. But shadowing his phenomenal career was a history of increasingly bizarre behaviour involving psychotic violence, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse, and humiliating self-destructive obsessions with people including Princess Margaret, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and each of his four wives (Ann Hayes, Britt Ekland, Miranda Quarry, and Lynne Frederick). He alternately showered his wives and children with gifts and then threatened to kill them. Sellers' fluidity as an actor made for a terrifying madness that grew like a slow metastasizing cancer throughout his adult life. The story of Peter Sellers concludes with his premature death at the age of 54, "sick at heart and alone in those sunless hotel rooms," so recoiled from intimacy that no one really knew him anymore.

What people say:

"An absolute revelation ... the book is packed with the kind of facts and anecdotes that make one drool." — Film Review

"Brilliant, disturbing biography of the mercurial British screen star." — New York Post

"It is by far the best-written, most literate celebrity biography of the year ... his research here has staggering breadth and depth, as does his relentless power of insight tempered with humanity ... This is a blue-moon biography. They don't come often." — The Hollywood Reporter

"A probing, unconventional, intensely agile and alert biography ... a vivid portrait." — Entertainment Weekly

"An extended meditation on what made Sellers an extraordinary performer and a toxic human being." — People

"Everything one could possibly want to know about Sellers is contained in this book." — The New York Times Book Review

"Unforgettable ... An epic meditation on talent and rampant egomania ... Lewis' analyses of the films are masterly ... shrewd, insightful and forgiving." — Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

Roger Lewis is a Welsh academic, critic, and biographer. Formerly a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, he is the author of numerous biographies including Anthony Burgess, Peter Sellers, and Laurence Olivier. He is a prolific literary journalist for the Express, Mail, and Telegraph.