Word: clouseau
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Peter Sellers is dead [Aug. 4], but his unique creations-Dr. Strangelove, Inspector Clouseau, Chance the gardener -will live on. Generations not yet born will hail Sellers as a comic genius in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. Sellers made us laugh. What better epitaph can a man have...
...Great Impersonator used unique methods for his special effects. The voice of bumbling Inspector Clouseau is swiped from a Paris hotel concierge; in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, a film that will be released next week, Sellers imitates the uncle of his friend Lord Snowdon. Aurally acute listeners to Chance may recognize the voice of Comedian Stan Laurel. Although he was unmusical offscreen, he could become an opera star if the part required it. "Peter couldn't sing a bloody note," recalled Actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. "Yet when he sang Caruso, he took high Cs like Caruso...
...aware, I have no personality of my own whatsoever," Sellers once said. For a guy with no personality, he had a lot of chutzpah. Somewhere within himself, he found a way to play Dr. Strange love and Henry Orient and Inspector Clouseau. And finally, Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-weaned hero of Being There...
...portrayal of a stupidly arrogant British shop steward kept creeping into my college thesis on Britain's Angry Young Men," she recalls. "In 1974, when I was interviewing an M.I.T. disarmament expert for TIME, I couldn't help thinking of Sellers' Dr. Strangelove. And his Inspector Clouseau defined my first encounter with a French police detective." But when Burton interviewed Sellers in Paris for this week's cover story, written by Contributor Richard Schickel, she found her subject to be maddeningly elusive. "He doesn't like to talk about himself, and when he does...
...also the source of hilarity in that small masterpiece, The Party, in which Sellers plays a beturbanned Indian, somehow-invited to a grand affair, and wandering through it, friendless and almost silent, but wreaking havoc wherever he turns. Finally, this impermeability is the mark of his great Inspector Clouseau. In countless scenes such as the one from A Shot in the Dark when Clouseau stumbled through a roomful of guests in evening dress, out through an open French window and sailed through the air to land in a pond below, the inspector's uncanny Sang-froid has never faltered. Whether...