Post by Clouseau on Feb 9, 2008 2:54:23 GMT
some information is finally starting to come together about this supposed play!
www.express.co.uk/features/view/34291/Tragedy-Of-The-Grim-Goon
www.express.co.uk/features/view/34291/Tragedy-Of-The-Grim-Goon
TRAGEDY OF THE GRIM GOON
Friday February 8,2008
By Simon Edge
ACTOR Peter Sellers may not have been a bungler like Inspector Clouseau, the chaotic French detective he played with resounding success in the Pink Panther films, but he was a sucker for mystics.
His superstition and belief in second sight was a weakness that those around him exploited to the full. The clairvoyant who advised him that someone with the initials BE would change his life was actually in the pay of Sellers’ own agent, who wanted him to sign up with director Blake Edwards for the Panther films.
In the event Sellers interpreted the prediction differently: meeting beautiful Swedish actress Britt Ekland at the Dorchester Hotel in London, he proposed to her within three weeks and made her his second wife.
The marriage didn’t last but it produced a daughter, Victoria, and Ekland also formed a warm and lasting relationship with Sellers’ children from his first marriage, Michael and Sarah.
In that respect the dodgy advice did no lasting harm, which is more than can be said for the fortune-teller who assured the actor he would live to a ripe old age. Plagued by a grave heart condition but terrified of the surgery that might cure it, Sellers found it easier to put his trust in would-be soothsayers who told him what he wanted to hear. Unfortunately it bore little relation to what was actually going to happen. Sellers was just 54 when he died in 1980.
The troubled last days of one of Britain’s biggest international comedy successes, who first shot to fame in the radio comedy The Goon Show and was nominated for Oscars for his roles in Dr Strangelove and Being There, are the subject of a play by his friend, writer John Antrobus.
The play will open at London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket, once a suitable actor has been found to play the madcap but notoriously moody actor. Robin Williams and Robert Downey Jr have been mentioned as possibilities and this weekend it emerged that Hollywood heavyweight Al Pacino has also read the script – but has ruled out taking the role.
Antrobus visited Sellers on the Paris set of his last film, The Fiendish Plot Of Dr Fu Manchu, where the actor had to use an oxygen mask in his dressing room between scenes.
But Sellers did not rely on Western medicine alone. “Peter was interested in the mystic side of life and went to visit Mayan healers with his last wife Lynne Frederick,” says the writer. “He had sublime faith that life was eternal but at the same time he could be scared like a little boy sometimes about what was going on.”
Worth some £4million at his death, Sellers lived in tax exile at the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, which featured prominently in the third Panther film, The Return Of The Pink Panther. He also kept a permanent suite at the Dorchester and numbered Princess Margaret and the Aga Khan among his friends. A lavish spender, he changed his flash cars so often that fellow Goon Spike Milligan called them his “metal underwear”.
Despite his wealth, contentment was elusive. The man whose children described him as a raging tyrant in private had jealously wrecked the stage career of his first wife Anne Hayes, by locking her in her room before curtain-up. Ekland has described him as “a monster” with “no saving graces at all”. His third marriage, to Miranda Quarry, had collapsed after four years and his fourth, to Frederick, was also on the rocks at the time of his death.
“He’d split up with everyone and the only people around him were those on his payroll,” says Roger Lewis, whose biography was made into the film The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers, starring Australian actor Geoffrey Rush. “He really was the tragic clown. He was living in Switzerland with a valet who did everything for him. Lynne Frederick had left him but the divorce hadn’t yet been signed. He was very lonely.”
Sellers was also burdened by a health problem since a near-fatal heart attack in 1964 left permanent damage. In 1976 he visited South African heart transplant pioneer Dr Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town. Scheduled to have a similar procedure, he watched one of Barnard’s operations, photographing the surgery in detail. The gory experience terrified him and he refused to go ahead with his own operation.
“He went back to his hotel room, locked the door and wouldn’t come out,” recalled his son Michael.
Sellers went on to consult New Age healers in the Philippines, who treated him and said he was cured. “He believed them and promptly keeled over,” said Michael. “He was then admitted to a proper hospital and fitted with a pacemaker.”
By the year of his death Sellers was reconciled to a transplant and doctors were looking for a suitable donor. This is the scene that Antrobus, who co-wrote Sellers’ 1963 crime caper The Wrong Arm Of The Law, paints in his play It’s All In The Mind, Folks!
“It’s about the latter days of Peter’s life and it takes place in his chalet in Gstaad,” he says. “He is at the stage where he is looking for a new heart, in a grievous condition really. It is also a time when he wants to be reconciled with Lynne Frederick. She comes to Gstaad and there’s an argument about the will. Michael comes as well.”
HE adds: “The play is about how Peter deals with the relationships or doesn’t deal with them. Of course, it’s a fictionalised account because I wasn’t there but Peter used to hide behind voices and mimickry. Without giving too much away at this stage, I show Michael trying to nail him down and establish some relationship with him, some honesty as father and son, and Peter is always slipping away.”
Michael Sellers, who died after a heart attack two years ago, aged 52, published two memoirs about his difficult relationship with his father.
When I met him in 2002, he recalled his parents’ turbulent marriage. “My bedroom backed on to theirs and I had been waking up for years with him shouting at night,” he said. “When I was six years old he woke me up one night and said, ‘Do you think your mother and I should get divorced?’ What was he asking a six-year-old for?”
After divorcing Michael and Sarah’s mother, Sellers asked them which parent they loved most. When Michael answered “Mummy”, Sellers flew into a rage. “You get out,” he shouted. “And take all your stuff. I never want to see you again. You are no longer my child.”
He never apologised. On other occasions he beat the boy savagely.
Michael had begun to form a belated bond with his father shortly before his death – which is why Sellers’ will came as a shock. Lewis says he had planned to leave his fortune to the British Heart Foundation but he died before the changes were complete and Frederick got virtually everything.His three children received around £800 each.
“If I hadn’t needed the money so much at the time I’d have framed the cheque and stuck it on my toilet wall,” Michael told me, with a striking lack of bitterness.
But he spoke of his frustration that Sellers never explained why he left his children almost nothing.
“If his motives were the best, that it wouldn’t be good for us to have all that money, that would have been fine. But he never explained, so I spent a long period wondering whether he’d meant it, or whether Lynne had manipulated us out of it. Perhaps she said, ‘Just give it all to me and I’ll look after them, Peter’. That sounds about right, actually.”
Frederick married broadcaster David Frost just six months after Sellers’s death and went on to have a third failed marriage to a Hollywood heart surgeon, before dying of drug and alcohol abuse in 1994, aged 41. She had just £27,000 of her inheritance left.
NATURALLY Antrobus is reluctant to give too much away about his play but admits his script takes Michael’s side rather than Frederick’s. “In my account, Michael’s concern is to establish a
loving relationship with his father and money comes a long way second,” he says. “That is not the case with Lynne.”
He has no illusions about his friend’s faults but says Sellers showed him nothing but personal kindness. Antrobus does not go along with a remark by Blake Edwards that his only fear of going to hell was that he might find Peter Sellers there.
“I hope they’ll both be in heaven,” says Antrobus.
Friday February 8,2008
By Simon Edge
ACTOR Peter Sellers may not have been a bungler like Inspector Clouseau, the chaotic French detective he played with resounding success in the Pink Panther films, but he was a sucker for mystics.
His superstition and belief in second sight was a weakness that those around him exploited to the full. The clairvoyant who advised him that someone with the initials BE would change his life was actually in the pay of Sellers’ own agent, who wanted him to sign up with director Blake Edwards for the Panther films.
In the event Sellers interpreted the prediction differently: meeting beautiful Swedish actress Britt Ekland at the Dorchester Hotel in London, he proposed to her within three weeks and made her his second wife.
The marriage didn’t last but it produced a daughter, Victoria, and Ekland also formed a warm and lasting relationship with Sellers’ children from his first marriage, Michael and Sarah.
In that respect the dodgy advice did no lasting harm, which is more than can be said for the fortune-teller who assured the actor he would live to a ripe old age. Plagued by a grave heart condition but terrified of the surgery that might cure it, Sellers found it easier to put his trust in would-be soothsayers who told him what he wanted to hear. Unfortunately it bore little relation to what was actually going to happen. Sellers was just 54 when he died in 1980.
The troubled last days of one of Britain’s biggest international comedy successes, who first shot to fame in the radio comedy The Goon Show and was nominated for Oscars for his roles in Dr Strangelove and Being There, are the subject of a play by his friend, writer John Antrobus.
The play will open at London’s Theatre Royal, Haymarket, once a suitable actor has been found to play the madcap but notoriously moody actor. Robin Williams and Robert Downey Jr have been mentioned as possibilities and this weekend it emerged that Hollywood heavyweight Al Pacino has also read the script – but has ruled out taking the role.
Antrobus visited Sellers on the Paris set of his last film, The Fiendish Plot Of Dr Fu Manchu, where the actor had to use an oxygen mask in his dressing room between scenes.
But Sellers did not rely on Western medicine alone. “Peter was interested in the mystic side of life and went to visit Mayan healers with his last wife Lynne Frederick,” says the writer. “He had sublime faith that life was eternal but at the same time he could be scared like a little boy sometimes about what was going on.”
Worth some £4million at his death, Sellers lived in tax exile at the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, which featured prominently in the third Panther film, The Return Of The Pink Panther. He also kept a permanent suite at the Dorchester and numbered Princess Margaret and the Aga Khan among his friends. A lavish spender, he changed his flash cars so often that fellow Goon Spike Milligan called them his “metal underwear”.
Despite his wealth, contentment was elusive. The man whose children described him as a raging tyrant in private had jealously wrecked the stage career of his first wife Anne Hayes, by locking her in her room before curtain-up. Ekland has described him as “a monster” with “no saving graces at all”. His third marriage, to Miranda Quarry, had collapsed after four years and his fourth, to Frederick, was also on the rocks at the time of his death.
“He’d split up with everyone and the only people around him were those on his payroll,” says Roger Lewis, whose biography was made into the film The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers, starring Australian actor Geoffrey Rush. “He really was the tragic clown. He was living in Switzerland with a valet who did everything for him. Lynne Frederick had left him but the divorce hadn’t yet been signed. He was very lonely.”
Sellers was also burdened by a health problem since a near-fatal heart attack in 1964 left permanent damage. In 1976 he visited South African heart transplant pioneer Dr Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town. Scheduled to have a similar procedure, he watched one of Barnard’s operations, photographing the surgery in detail. The gory experience terrified him and he refused to go ahead with his own operation.
“He went back to his hotel room, locked the door and wouldn’t come out,” recalled his son Michael.
Sellers went on to consult New Age healers in the Philippines, who treated him and said he was cured. “He believed them and promptly keeled over,” said Michael. “He was then admitted to a proper hospital and fitted with a pacemaker.”
By the year of his death Sellers was reconciled to a transplant and doctors were looking for a suitable donor. This is the scene that Antrobus, who co-wrote Sellers’ 1963 crime caper The Wrong Arm Of The Law, paints in his play It’s All In The Mind, Folks!
“It’s about the latter days of Peter’s life and it takes place in his chalet in Gstaad,” he says. “He is at the stage where he is looking for a new heart, in a grievous condition really. It is also a time when he wants to be reconciled with Lynne Frederick. She comes to Gstaad and there’s an argument about the will. Michael comes as well.”
HE adds: “The play is about how Peter deals with the relationships or doesn’t deal with them. Of course, it’s a fictionalised account because I wasn’t there but Peter used to hide behind voices and mimickry. Without giving too much away at this stage, I show Michael trying to nail him down and establish some relationship with him, some honesty as father and son, and Peter is always slipping away.”
Michael Sellers, who died after a heart attack two years ago, aged 52, published two memoirs about his difficult relationship with his father.
When I met him in 2002, he recalled his parents’ turbulent marriage. “My bedroom backed on to theirs and I had been waking up for years with him shouting at night,” he said. “When I was six years old he woke me up one night and said, ‘Do you think your mother and I should get divorced?’ What was he asking a six-year-old for?”
After divorcing Michael and Sarah’s mother, Sellers asked them which parent they loved most. When Michael answered “Mummy”, Sellers flew into a rage. “You get out,” he shouted. “And take all your stuff. I never want to see you again. You are no longer my child.”
He never apologised. On other occasions he beat the boy savagely.
Michael had begun to form a belated bond with his father shortly before his death – which is why Sellers’ will came as a shock. Lewis says he had planned to leave his fortune to the British Heart Foundation but he died before the changes were complete and Frederick got virtually everything.His three children received around £800 each.
“If I hadn’t needed the money so much at the time I’d have framed the cheque and stuck it on my toilet wall,” Michael told me, with a striking lack of bitterness.
But he spoke of his frustration that Sellers never explained why he left his children almost nothing.
“If his motives were the best, that it wouldn’t be good for us to have all that money, that would have been fine. But he never explained, so I spent a long period wondering whether he’d meant it, or whether Lynne had manipulated us out of it. Perhaps she said, ‘Just give it all to me and I’ll look after them, Peter’. That sounds about right, actually.”
Frederick married broadcaster David Frost just six months after Sellers’s death and went on to have a third failed marriage to a Hollywood heart surgeon, before dying of drug and alcohol abuse in 1994, aged 41. She had just £27,000 of her inheritance left.
NATURALLY Antrobus is reluctant to give too much away about his play but admits his script takes Michael’s side rather than Frederick’s. “In my account, Michael’s concern is to establish a
loving relationship with his father and money comes a long way second,” he says. “That is not the case with Lynne.”
He has no illusions about his friend’s faults but says Sellers showed him nothing but personal kindness. Antrobus does not go along with a remark by Blake Edwards that his only fear of going to hell was that he might find Peter Sellers there.
“I hope they’ll both be in heaven,” says Antrobus.
