The 7 Best And 7 Worst Peter Sellers Movies Ranked

The true story of Peter Sellers was so famously chaotic that it inspired a bestselling book and TV movie, both titled "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers." Notoriously volatile and enigmatic, he once reportedly told Roger Ebert that he had "absolutely no personality at all. I am a chameleon. When I am not playing a role, I am nobody." That probably explains why so many of his best films were built around his ability to completely transform into a character, often through elaborate makeup and distinctive voices.

Born in 1925 in Portsmouth, England, Sellers' career began on the English radio program "The Goon Show" and the short film "The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film," which brought him an Oscar nomination. When he moved into acting, he displayed a talent for comedy and slapstick, often based around a broadly sketched character. His most famous creation was perhaps the bumbling French policeman Inspector Clouseau from the "Pink Panther" series, who he played five times.

Sellers often played multiple characters in the same film, and he had a chameleon-like talent for disappearing into a role without the use of prosthetics. He stayed busy until his untimely death in 1980 from a heart attack at the age of 54.

Let's take a look back at Peter Sellers' seven best and seven worst films, ranked.

Peter Sellers scored one of his earliest hits with this classic from Ealing Studios, a British production company that specialized in pitch-black comedies about crooks, killers, and ordinary men. Many of the studio's most successful films (including this one) starred Alec Guinness in the type of role that Sellers would later become famous for: comedic caricatures with a variety of voices and disguises, often playing different characters within the same movie.

In the case of "The Ladykillers," Guinness plays the sinister Professor Marcus, who rents some rooms from the elderly Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) as a rehearsal space for his amateur string quartet. Unbeknownst to her, Marcus's band is actually a gang of criminals using her home to plan a bank robbery. Among his crew are the courtly conman Major Claude Courtney (Cecil Parker), the murderous gangster Louis Harvey (Herbert Lom), the dimwitted ex-boxer "One-Round" Lawson (Danny Green), and the petty Cockney criminal Harry Robinson (Sellers). Fearing Mrs. Wilberforce might become wise to their plan, they scheme to knock the old lady off, leading to their own comedic demises.

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick from an Oscar-nominated script by William Rose, "The Ladykillers" remains one of Ealing's most acclaimed titles. In a contemporary review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called it, "a superbly elegant comedy." Kate Muir of Times UK agreed, proclaiming it, "One of the great Ealing comedies of the 1950s." Even a 2004 Coen Brothers remake couldn't match the original for critical praise.

There's an obvious problem with "The Party," which is Peter Sellers wearing brown makeup to play an Indian character. Blake Edwards' slapstick farces casts him as Hrundi V. Bakshi, a bumbling actor who wreaks havoc on a movie set, leading studio executive Fred Clutterbuck (J. Edward McKinley) to fire him. But Clutterbuck unwittingly invites Bakshi to a party at his Hollywood mansion, where he wreaks further havoc before ingratiating himself with the partygoers, even finding love with aspiring actress Michele Monet (Claudine Longet).

In an essay for Pop Matters, Jesse Hassenger writes about the conflict modern viewers have with "The Party," which is the "empathy" Bakshi inspires coupled with the "unavoidable fact that Sellers is performing in brownface. Of course, cultural values were not the same in 1968 as they are now," and "to Sellers' credit, Bakshi is only a figure of fun in the sense that most slapstick creations are." Much like Inspector Clouseau from "The Pink Panther," "Bakshi has no malice in his heart, and is ultimately the movie's hero. The brownface, unfortunate as it looks now, doesn't entirely play as racist caricature because chameleonic comedy was the actor's stock in trade. The Indian character is just another Sellers mask, regardless of the extremely poor taste."

This view is reflected in its critical assessment, which remains strong. Roger Ebert called it a comeback for Sellers after a series of films that saw him "getting lazy." With "The Party," he "develops a character and plays it, for better or worse, for the whole movie."

Nora Johnson's book "The World of Henry Orient" was based on her own experiences as a teenage girl at Manhattan's private Brearley School, centering her story on a schoolgirl crush she and a friend had on actor-musician Oscar Levant. When it came time to do the film version, which was directed by George Roy Hill and scripted by Johnson and her father, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, Peter Sellers proved the perfect choice to play the object of her teenage affection.

Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth star as Valerie and Marian, adolescent best friends who follow egocentric concert pianist Henry Orient (Sellers) around New York City. Since he's pursuing an affair with a married woman (Paula Prentiss), Henry believes he's being stalked by a pair of spies hired by her husband. Further complications arise when Valerie's mother (Angela Lansbury) discovers her daughter's diary and assumes that she is dating an older man.

"The World of Henry Orient" received rave reviews, with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times calling it "one of the most joyous and comforting movies about teenagers that we've had in a long time." He praised Sellers' performance as "beautifully voluble and droll on a level of comic exposition that is just a wee bit above burlesque." After competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, it earned a Golden Globe nomination for best comedy-musical film, reaped a Writers Guild of America bid, and was named one of the year's 10 best films by the National Board of Review.

Stanley Kubrick made several changes in adapting Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel "Lolita" to the screen, many of which were dictated by censorship standards imposed by the Production Code. One of his most significant alterations was expanding the role of Clare Quilty, a mysterious figure in the book who becomes, as Kubrick later described, "a comic nightmare" in the movie. And in so doing, he provided Peter Sellers with one of his best roles.

James Mason stars as Humbert Humbert, a European professor who comes to America for a teaching job, renting a room from boorish widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters). He instantly falls in love with his new landlord's teenage daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyons), going so far as to marry Charlotte to stay near her. When his new wife dies, Humbert tries to keep Lolita all to himself, but he encounters some competition from Quilty, a famous playwright who grew obsessed with the young girl while dating her mother. He goes so far as to stalk the pair while they're on the road, posing as the eccentric Dr. Zempf.

Critics praised "Lolita," with Bosley Crowther of The New York Times writing, "the picture has a rare power, a garbled but moving push toward an off-beat communication." Although Variety was less enthused, they did approve of Sellers' performance as "a preposterously smug American playwright" who "gets a chance to run through several hilarious changes of character." The film earned an Oscar nomination for best-adapted screenplay and brought Sellers himself a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor.

Perhaps the most iconic character Peter Sellers ever played was Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the bumbling French police detective at the center of five "Pink Panther" films (six if you count the critically-derided "Trail of the Pink Panther," which was released two years after Sellers' death and largely assembled from unused footage from previous "Pink Panther" movies). Each entry was directed by Blake Edwards, who specialized in the kind of broad physical comedy that became Sellers' bread and butter.

In the first entry, "The Pink Panther," Inspector Clouseau travels to Rome to stop the notorious jewel thief known as "The Phantom" (David Niven) before he can steal the priceless "Pink Panther" diamond. The first sequel, "A Shot in the Dark," finds Clouseau investigating a murder at a vast country estate where the maid, Maria (Elke Sommer), is the prime suspect. After Alan Arkin played the role in the ill-fated "Inspector Clouseau," Sellers and Edwards revived the franchise with "The Return of the Pink Panther," in which Clouseau again tracks down the stolen "Pink Panther" jewel. In "The Pink Panther Strikes Again," Clouseau's former boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), is driven crazy by his antics and sends a group of assassins after him. And in "Revenge of the Pink Panther," Clouseau is mistakenly pronounced dead and re-emerges to take down drug kingpin Philippe Douvier (Robert Webber).

Others have attempted to play Clouseau (or a Clouseau figure) after Sellers' death, — including Steve Martin, Ted Wass, and Roberto Benigni — but none can match the original.

Peter Sellers' performance in Hal Ashby's "Being There" came back into focus following the election of Donald Trump, with many drawing parallels between Trump and the character of Chance, a simple-minded, TV-addicted gardener who similarly ascends to the presidency. It's a testament to Sellers' skill at depicting, as Mark Harris put it, "a placid cipher," that audiences can react to Chance in much the same way as the people he encounters in the movie, projecting whatever they want upon him. As Harris points out, many viewers at the time viewed it as "a prescient take on the rise of Ronald Reagan."

Chance the gardener has spent his entire life in the D.C. townhouse of his wealthy employer, learning everything he knows about the outside world through what he sees on television. When his boss dies, he's forced to vacate the house, and eventually finds himself in the back of a limo with Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), who mistakenly thinks his name is Chauncey Gardiner. Eve introduces him to her dying husband, wealthy businessman Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), who takes his gardening wisdom to be insights into the world at large. Before long Chance is the talk to the town, advising the president (Jack Warden) before being discussed as a potential candidate himself.

"Being There" received strong critical praise and earned Sellers an Oscar nomination as best actor, the last of his career. (He won the best actor prizes at the Golden Globes and National Board of Review.)

Peter Sellers' talent for playing several characters in the same production was never better demonstrated than in Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire. He takes on three different roles in "Dr. Strangelove": Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, who tries to stop crazed General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) from launching a nuclear weapon against Russia; U.S. President Merkin Muffley, who commands the American response from the War Room with General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott); and the Dr. Strangelove of the title, a wheelchair-bound nuclear expert and former Nazi who can't prevent his robotic hand from saluting Hitler.

When "Dr. Strangelove" was released in 1964, the threat of nuclear war with Russia was very much a reality, so much so that a serious take on the same subject, Sidney Lumet's "Fail-Safe," hit screens the same year. Although nuclear annihilation is no laughing matter, critics praised this pitch-black comedy, while Oscar voters rewarded it with four nominations: best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and best actor for Sellers.

Contemporary assessment has only grown stronger, with Roger Ebert calling it "the best political satire of the century, a film that pulled the rug out from under the Cold War by arguing that if a 'nuclear deterrent' destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say exactly what it has deterred." It's a message that rings even truer today.