Peter Sellers - Technique

Technique

"I start with the voice. I find out how the character sounds. It's through the way he speaks that I find out the rest about him. ... After the voice comes the looks of the man. I do a lot of drawings of the character I play. Then I get together with the makeup man and we sort of transfer my drawings onto my face. An involved process. After that I establish how the character walks. Very important, the walk. And then, suddenly, something strange happens. The person takes over. The man you play begins to exist."

—Sellers describing how he prepared for his wide range of roles in an October 1962 interview for Playboy.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times said of the Pink Panther films, "I'm not sure why Mr. 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." Film critic Elvis Mitchell has said that Sellers was one of the few comic geniuses who was able to truly hide behind his characters, giving the audience no sense of what he's really like in real life. A feature of the characterisations undertaken by Sellers is that regardless of how clumsy or idiotic they are, he ensured they always retain their dignity. On his playing of Clouseau Sellers said: "I set out to play Clouseau with great dignity because I feel that he thinks he is probably one of the greatest detectives in the world. The original script makes him out to be a complete idiot. I thought a forgivable vanity would humanise him and make him kind of touching." His biographer, Ed Sikov, notes that because of this retained dignity, Sellers is "the master of playing men who have no idea how ridiculous they are." Social historian Sam Wasson notes the complexity in Sellers's performances in the Pink Panther films, which has the effect of alienating Clouseau from his environment. Wesson considers that "As 'low' and 'high' comedy rolled into one, it's the performative counterpoint to Edwardian sophisticated naturalism". This combination of "high" and "low", exemplified by Clouseau's attempting to retain dignity after a fall, means that within the film Clouseau was "the sole representative of humanity". Film critic Dilys Powell also saw the inherent dignity in the parts and wrote that Sellers had a "balance between character and absurdity". Richard Attenborough also thought that because of his sympathy, Sellers could "inject into his characterisations the frailty and substance of a human being".

Author Aaron Sultanik observed that in Sellers's early films, such as I'm Alright Jack, he displays "deft, technical interpretations pinpoint the mechanical nature of his comic characterization", which "reduces each of his characters to a series of gross, awkward tics". Academic Cynthia Baron observed that Sellers's external characterisations led to doubt with reviewers as to whether Sellers's work was "true" acting. Critic Tom Milne saw a change over Sellers's 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. Sultanik agreed, commenting that Sellers's "exceptional vocal and physical technique" was under-used during his career in the US.

Academics Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis remarked that Sellers fits the mould of a technical actor because he displays a mastery of physical characterisation, such as accent or physical trait. Writer and playwright John Mortimer saw the process for himself when Sellers was about to undertake filming on Mortimer's The Dock Brief and could not decide how to play the character of the barrister. 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". So important was the voice as the starting point for character development Sellers would walk round London with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, recording voices to study at home.