Post by Clouseau on Jul 27, 2006 19:14:57 GMT
so far, only The Daily Mail seems to have picked this up online, and there's no exact date given for this, but as i fear it may indeed be true, i thought i'd better go ahead and post it...
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=397657&in_page_id=1770
quite sad, if you ask me... and odd, too, since, we just marked the anniversary of his father's death, three days ago...
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=397657&in_page_id=1770
Deadly legacy of a Goon
by GLENYS ROBERTS, Daily Mail
22:19pm 25th July 2006
The wedding was the talk of two continents. The happy couple, who had known each other for only ten days, married in such freezing weather in the winter of 1964 that the beautiful Britt Ekland was always known as the Snowflake Bride.
Just six weeks later, Peter Sellers had his first, near-fatal, heart attack. Only 39 years old, he was raced to a Hollywood hospital where, after clinically dying no fewer than eight times, he was revived using the latest medical technology.
His son, Michael, was just ten when the Grim Reaper first toyed with the great comic, ex-Goon star of the Pink Panther films and lover of Princess Margaret.
Young Michael — Sellers’s son from his first, ten-year marriage to former actress Anne Howe — knew that early deaths were in the family. He had already lost his grandfather and an uncle to heart disease. From then on, he must have lived in dread of his father dying every day — until in 1980 the eccentric comedian finally succumbed to another heart attack at the age of just 54.
Now, history has repeated itself. Michael, too, has died, during heart surgery, at only 52 — proving poignantly that the Sellers family genes were even more powerful than his father’s notorious and profligate lifestyle.
For Michael Sellers — occasional builder and property dealer, sometime car salesman, musician, writer and well-intentioned son, husband and father — cardiac problems seem to have been the only thing he had in common with his hard-living father, whose first attack was almost certainly brought on by a surfeit of chemical ‘poppers’ taken as a sex stimulant, which was all the rage in those days.
Loyal to the last and still confused by his appalling relationship with the comic genius 25 years after losing him, Michael was trying to forgive his father right up until his death.
Yet some of Michael’s most enduring memories were also the most bitter — for example, the rows between his parents when his father returned from filming.
The little boy’s bedroom backed on to his parents’ room in North London and though Michael cowered under the covers, he could still hear them shouting and screaming at each other.
‘As far as I am aware, he never hit Mum but paintings and mirrors used to be ripped off the wall,’ he said. ‘Dad had a mercurial, irrational temper, you could upset him with a look.’
Sellers’s rantings frequently spilled over to his dealings with Michael and his younger sister, Sarah. On one occasion, when the youngster tried to help by painting out a scratch on his father’s beloved Rolls-Royce, Sellers flew into a rage and took a belt to the boy.
By the time Michael was eight his feuding parents had separated. Happily for the children, their mother soon married again — ‘to a wonderful man, far more of a father than my father was,’ a grateful Michael always recalled. Finally he enjoyed a happy home life — at least during term time.
When the school holidays came, he was whisked away with Sarah to wherever his father happened to be having fun.
Sometimes it was to Rome, where Sellers had developed a huge crush on Sophia Loren, the curvaceous Italian actress.
Other holidays were spent in Monte Carlo, New York or Hollywood, while at home they waterskied in Windsor Great Park with Princess Margaret.
‘I liked her. She was part of my childhood. My father told me they had an affair,’ Michael said. ‘He told me the Queen would pop in wearing slacks and a jumper and join them for a drink.’
But, while Michael listened to these stories wide-eyed, the reality for a small boy who wanted only a settled home life was far less glamorous than it sounds.
On one occasion, just before his father’s first heart attack, Michael did not want to go to Los Angeles for his holidays. When he arrived he had a row with Sellers, who accused him of not loving his father. Michael burst into tears, but still his father persisted: ‘Who do you love most, your mother or me?’
‘Mum,’ said Michael truthfully.
‘OK, that’s it,’ screamed Sellers and put him straight back on the plane to London. Shortly afterwards, a trunk arrived containing the contents of Michael’s bedroom in Sellers’s LA home with a cruel note saying: ‘I never want to see you again. I disown you.’
It was not the only time Sellers tried to cut relations with his son. Once he wrote: ‘I no longer wish to be thought of as your father. The time has come for you to continue on your own way. My final suggestion is you change your surname.’
Things improved slightly when Sellers married the beautiful Ekland. ‘Though she was only 21 she was very motherly,’ Michael remembered gratefully.
But soon he was living through his father’s thermo-nuclear rows with Ekland just as he had with his mother — and all because of Sellers’s dreaded possessiveness.
When Sellers was married to Anne he had locked her in the bathroom so she could not carry on working as an actress. Now he refused to let Ekland work with Dean Martin because she would have had to kiss the American heartthrob. The couple divorced after only four years.
Sellers’s next marriage, in 1970, to Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter Miranda Quarry, spelled even worse news for Michael.
This time the children were invited to spend the summer in Venice where the newlyweds were staying. Michael arrived by gondola with his suitcases, but no sooner had his bags been unloaded than Sellers and Miranda took possession of the boat and punted off for the rest of the holiday — leaving Michael alone.
Before his next marriage to David Frost’s ill-fated girlfriend (and later wife) Lynne Frederick in 1977, Peter asked his children’s advice. ‘Shall I marry her or Tessa Dahl?’ he said nonchalantly, showing them photographs of the two contenders. Michael, now 22, and his sister chose Frederick — a decision they came to regret.
Oddly, it was only in his own personal failure that Michael would finally identify with the influence that dominated his life.
Father and son became friends when Michael’s first wife Kathy left him after three weeks. Michael credited Sellers for warning him against the marriage. ‘That started us talking as adults,’ said Michael.
Tragically, the rapprochement did not last long. Just a few months later — in July 1980 — Sellers was dead.
But still he had reserved one vindictive parting shot against Michael. Having made millions, the comic left just £800 to his son.
An estate, cash, cars, houses and art amounting to £4.5 million went to Lynne Frederick. ‘It was a calculated and considered act,’ Michael said. ‘Even his lawyers blushed when they told me.’
Michael went on to have a chequered professional life. He married a teacher, Alison, and had two children, though that marriage, too, came to an end recently.
At times he cheerfully confessed he was close to bankruptcy, having lost precious family heirlooms to Frederick, who died aged 39 addicted to drugs and drink.
At least he escaped that ending. He escaped, too, the fate of his half-sister Victoria, Sellers’s daughter by Ekland, who fell into cocaine abuse and worked for a while for the Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss.
Michael’s legacy from his overpowering parent was simply an unresolved resentment which, however, he was determined to come to terms with before he died.
In 2000 he wrote a book, Sellers On Sellers, in which he summed up his father’s life — and his own — in a memorably sad epitaph.
‘He had been there: starred in the movies, married the young women, driven the fast cars, taken the drugs, drunk the wine, made all the cash, spent the cash and let down all those people who had ever really cared for him.’
by GLENYS ROBERTS, Daily Mail
22:19pm 25th July 2006
The wedding was the talk of two continents. The happy couple, who had known each other for only ten days, married in such freezing weather in the winter of 1964 that the beautiful Britt Ekland was always known as the Snowflake Bride.
Just six weeks later, Peter Sellers had his first, near-fatal, heart attack. Only 39 years old, he was raced to a Hollywood hospital where, after clinically dying no fewer than eight times, he was revived using the latest medical technology.
His son, Michael, was just ten when the Grim Reaper first toyed with the great comic, ex-Goon star of the Pink Panther films and lover of Princess Margaret.
Young Michael — Sellers’s son from his first, ten-year marriage to former actress Anne Howe — knew that early deaths were in the family. He had already lost his grandfather and an uncle to heart disease. From then on, he must have lived in dread of his father dying every day — until in 1980 the eccentric comedian finally succumbed to another heart attack at the age of just 54.
Now, history has repeated itself. Michael, too, has died, during heart surgery, at only 52 — proving poignantly that the Sellers family genes were even more powerful than his father’s notorious and profligate lifestyle.
For Michael Sellers — occasional builder and property dealer, sometime car salesman, musician, writer and well-intentioned son, husband and father — cardiac problems seem to have been the only thing he had in common with his hard-living father, whose first attack was almost certainly brought on by a surfeit of chemical ‘poppers’ taken as a sex stimulant, which was all the rage in those days.
Loyal to the last and still confused by his appalling relationship with the comic genius 25 years after losing him, Michael was trying to forgive his father right up until his death.
Yet some of Michael’s most enduring memories were also the most bitter — for example, the rows between his parents when his father returned from filming.
The little boy’s bedroom backed on to his parents’ room in North London and though Michael cowered under the covers, he could still hear them shouting and screaming at each other.
‘As far as I am aware, he never hit Mum but paintings and mirrors used to be ripped off the wall,’ he said. ‘Dad had a mercurial, irrational temper, you could upset him with a look.’
Sellers’s rantings frequently spilled over to his dealings with Michael and his younger sister, Sarah. On one occasion, when the youngster tried to help by painting out a scratch on his father’s beloved Rolls-Royce, Sellers flew into a rage and took a belt to the boy.
By the time Michael was eight his feuding parents had separated. Happily for the children, their mother soon married again — ‘to a wonderful man, far more of a father than my father was,’ a grateful Michael always recalled. Finally he enjoyed a happy home life — at least during term time.
When the school holidays came, he was whisked away with Sarah to wherever his father happened to be having fun.
Sometimes it was to Rome, where Sellers had developed a huge crush on Sophia Loren, the curvaceous Italian actress.
Other holidays were spent in Monte Carlo, New York or Hollywood, while at home they waterskied in Windsor Great Park with Princess Margaret.
‘I liked her. She was part of my childhood. My father told me they had an affair,’ Michael said. ‘He told me the Queen would pop in wearing slacks and a jumper and join them for a drink.’
But, while Michael listened to these stories wide-eyed, the reality for a small boy who wanted only a settled home life was far less glamorous than it sounds.
On one occasion, just before his father’s first heart attack, Michael did not want to go to Los Angeles for his holidays. When he arrived he had a row with Sellers, who accused him of not loving his father. Michael burst into tears, but still his father persisted: ‘Who do you love most, your mother or me?’
‘Mum,’ said Michael truthfully.
‘OK, that’s it,’ screamed Sellers and put him straight back on the plane to London. Shortly afterwards, a trunk arrived containing the contents of Michael’s bedroom in Sellers’s LA home with a cruel note saying: ‘I never want to see you again. I disown you.’
It was not the only time Sellers tried to cut relations with his son. Once he wrote: ‘I no longer wish to be thought of as your father. The time has come for you to continue on your own way. My final suggestion is you change your surname.’
Things improved slightly when Sellers married the beautiful Ekland. ‘Though she was only 21 she was very motherly,’ Michael remembered gratefully.
But soon he was living through his father’s thermo-nuclear rows with Ekland just as he had with his mother — and all because of Sellers’s dreaded possessiveness.
When Sellers was married to Anne he had locked her in the bathroom so she could not carry on working as an actress. Now he refused to let Ekland work with Dean Martin because she would have had to kiss the American heartthrob. The couple divorced after only four years.
Sellers’s next marriage, in 1970, to Lord Mancroft’s stepdaughter Miranda Quarry, spelled even worse news for Michael.
This time the children were invited to spend the summer in Venice where the newlyweds were staying. Michael arrived by gondola with his suitcases, but no sooner had his bags been unloaded than Sellers and Miranda took possession of the boat and punted off for the rest of the holiday — leaving Michael alone.
Before his next marriage to David Frost’s ill-fated girlfriend (and later wife) Lynne Frederick in 1977, Peter asked his children’s advice. ‘Shall I marry her or Tessa Dahl?’ he said nonchalantly, showing them photographs of the two contenders. Michael, now 22, and his sister chose Frederick — a decision they came to regret.
Oddly, it was only in his own personal failure that Michael would finally identify with the influence that dominated his life.
Father and son became friends when Michael’s first wife Kathy left him after three weeks. Michael credited Sellers for warning him against the marriage. ‘That started us talking as adults,’ said Michael.
Tragically, the rapprochement did not last long. Just a few months later — in July 1980 — Sellers was dead.
But still he had reserved one vindictive parting shot against Michael. Having made millions, the comic left just £800 to his son.
An estate, cash, cars, houses and art amounting to £4.5 million went to Lynne Frederick. ‘It was a calculated and considered act,’ Michael said. ‘Even his lawyers blushed when they told me.’
Michael went on to have a chequered professional life. He married a teacher, Alison, and had two children, though that marriage, too, came to an end recently.
At times he cheerfully confessed he was close to bankruptcy, having lost precious family heirlooms to Frederick, who died aged 39 addicted to drugs and drink.
At least he escaped that ending. He escaped, too, the fate of his half-sister Victoria, Sellers’s daughter by Ekland, who fell into cocaine abuse and worked for a while for the Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss.
Michael’s legacy from his overpowering parent was simply an unresolved resentment which, however, he was determined to come to terms with before he died.
In 2000 he wrote a book, Sellers On Sellers, in which he summed up his father’s life — and his own — in a memorably sad epitaph.
‘He had been there: starred in the movies, married the young women, driven the fast cars, taken the drugs, drunk the wine, made all the cash, spent the cash and let down all those people who had ever really cared for him.’
quite sad, if you ask me... and odd, too, since, we just marked the anniversary of his father's death, three days ago...
