Rating: 
Summary: I certainly hope the film of this book isn't as horrid
Review: Thankfully, I borrowed this garbage from the library and didn't purchase it. The problem with this book is that the writer makes outrageous claims based on anecdotal evidence. He claims that because Peter Sellers enjoyed "Harold and Maude" he had an incestuous fantasy about his mother. He waits until the end of the book and asks, "Was he a homosexual?". Then, he doesn't answer this question at all. He just picks up on a common theme in the films Peter was in. (Well, was he homosexual or incestuous towards his mother?) But THIS is the real key to why this book is meaningless.... The author quotes Peter Sellers from an interview he did AFTER HE DIED through a medium. Twice. He makes the argument that Peter was insane, and certainly SOME of his behaviour was strange, but he fails in his attempts. The author has the audacity to second-guess Kubrick's (wise) decision to remove the original ending of Dr. Strangelove. And he further illustrates his lack of insight concerning Being There. Peter commented how Chance's life is almost like Heaven. The author concludes that anyone who has an ounce of sanity would think Chance's life hell. Obviously, this man has no concept of Buddhism. All in all, avoid this book at all costs. I recommend Ed Sikov's "Mr. Strangelove" instead. Oh, and keep in mind that the photograph of Peter in a hospital in this book has since been established as a fraud.
Rating: 
Summary: Determinedly negative
Review: There are interesting points and anecdotes related in this overly-long biography, but Lewis seems unable to distinguish between detail and repetition. I have read other biographies of Peter Sellers - whichever way you look at him a fascinating man. How this bio differs in the greatest way from others is that the author seems to be absolutely determined to interpret everything Peter Sellers did or said, and everything anyone else says about him, in a negative way. I'm sure, as with any complex and highly gifted person, Sellers had his "issues".....and fame, as it seems to, certainly developed serious problems. But no balance between the good and bad seems to be drawn here. Lewis focuses almost solely on the negative and seems to have selected his material with the aim of portraying only the worst of Sellers, particularly regarding his personal character and relationships. Lewis virtually ignores any good times - and there were many, if Graham Stark's "Remembering Peter Sellers" (highly recommended) is reliable - and good and lasting friendships, instead focusing on, it would seem, every dispute and source of conflict that ever arose in his life. Overall this book succeeds only in giving a strongly negative slant to someone at least deserving respect.One has to ask: was the author's main aim here to actually portray "the real Peter Sellers" or to dishonour his memory? If you look at the people who loved this man...those who he hurt but who still liked him...those who disliked him but ultimately respected him....if you look at what they have said about Sellers (without it being set in a biased context which makes even praise sound negative) you will find a truer version of the man than this book shows. What Herbert Kretzmer said about him in Peter Evans' "The Mask Behind the Mask", which is echoed by his first wife in "Sellers on Sellers", says a lot to me about his nature: "The great thing about Peter was that he was a loveable man. You loved him despite everything, you loved him in many ways because of his almost tragic shortcomings.
"To be a friend of Peter Sellers you had to be a very sophisticated man, because you had to understand why he did the things he did. Perhaps it didn't make him any more endearing, but the man was singularly free of malice in the ordinary sense; it was simply that he so easily forgot too many of yesterday's promises and yesterday's passions." Lewis obviously lacks both the sophistication and insight to understand anything about Sellers as a man positively.
Rating: 
Summary: Best book on Sellers
Review: This biography is one of the most exhaustively researched and well written books about an actor that I have ever read. I've been a fan of Sellers for 30 years and have read every book I could find about the man, including the "authorised" (by Sellers' last wife, not Sellers himself) biography and 'P.S. I Love You' by Sellers son Michael, which was the best book about Peter Sellers I had read..until this one. A lot of people have taken issue with the fact that Lewis writes of Sellers as an "evil" man, but Lewis has interviewed many people who were close enough to Sellers to back up many of the authors claims about the actors erratic and sometimes downright mean and vindictive behaviour towards others. Lewis recognises and celebrates the actors extraordinary talents, but his primary goal is to peel back the layers of his public persona and show us the man as he was seen by those who were close to him. The Peter Sellers revealed in this book is a man who was obviously mentally ill, a man who clearly suffered from manic depression and crippling anxiety. Lewis writes of a man who physically and emotionally lashed at those in his personal and professional lives rather than reaching out for help and support. If you want to read a feelgood biography of Sellers, this is not the book for you. This is more like a cross between a biography and 'Hearts Of Darkness' as we accompany the writer through a journey where he uses every method at his disposal to locate the "real" Peter Sellers. It's a sometimes harrowing journey that is subjective by its nature, and it's not a trip to take if you want a typical showbiz biography. It's also worth noting that the original UK edition is even more hard hitting as it contains some material that has been excised from this US version (an interview with one of the Boulting brothers has been removed from this edition, for example). This book is being adapted as a HBO movie starring Geoffrey Rush as Sellers. It is currently filming and should be released late 2003/early 2004.
Rating:
Summary: A rough draft
Review: This book is not really a biography; it is a rough draft of one. We get great chunks of undigested research; biographical details on other people--Alec Guinness, for example--that seem to go on for pages; biographical details on the author; his editorial comments on quotes from his sources; footnotes on his sources' responses to his inquiry letters; even his snide comments and jokes about their responses. He repeats material endlessly. After about five chapters, we take the point that Sellers was a shit in real life, but have to wade through many more chapters on the same subject. At the end of all this, Mr. Lewis decides that Sellers is really e-vil. Actually, it is quite obvious that Sellers had some form of clinical mental illness-possibly schizophrenia but more likely manic depression--from the descriptions of his behaviour in the book. It is perhaps a comment on movie stardom that it is the one career that being a flaming nutball does not disqualify you for. Clara Bow, for example, had a successful, if not happy, Hollywood career; she was schizophrenic (which in her case, manifested itself as a completed lack of judgment and the inability to learn from experience--see "Runnin' Wild", an excellent biography of her). Several other actors and actresses suffer from manic depression and still get work and have careers. Anyone familiar with the details of the lives of Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Groucho Marx or Jerry Lewis knows that they were/are a thoroughly unpleasant lot with no gift for family life. It seems to go with the territory. The most valuable part of this book is the research on Sellers' work. Granted, the Goon show means little or nothing to a North American audience, and to judge from the excerpts the book provides, perhaps rightly. British humour does not always travel, as anyone who has seen "On the Buses", "Mr. Bean" or the unspeakable Barrie Humphries--to whom this book is dedicated--can attest. But Sellers made many a movie, and Mr. Lewis has seen them all. Perhaps no other international star made so many obscure films. "Ghost in the Noonday Sun"; "The Optimists of Nine Elms"; "Soft Beds, Hard Battles"--whoever thought up these awful titles and who thought that they would draw flies at the box office? Mr. Lewis has a lot of fun with Sellers and the movie moguls--who are very willing to tolerate his quite obvious looniness if he will just draw at the box office. And for those that think that it could not happen today, witness Woody Allen and his fondness for (ahem) rather young ladies. Hasn't appeared to hurt his career at all. As Elizabeth Taylor once said, and she should know,"There is no deordorant like success." Mr. Lewis appears to be rather young, and this book does read like juvenilia. There are a lot of good things in it, but it needs to be cut by about two-thirds, Mr. Lewis needs to calm down a good deal, and he needs a good fact-checker and editor. I've rarely seen so many spelling errors. Mr. Lewis is intelligent and I'm willing to bet that when he is older he will reread this book and cringe at its excesses. At least, I hope he will.
Rating:
Summary: A Frustrating Portrayal
Review: Unfortunately, Roger Lewis appears to use the writing of a biography on Peter Sellers as an excuse to just go off. In the end, this biography is more about Lewis and his absolutely asinine and inane extrapolations from research than it is about Sellers. Rather than see an accurate portrayal of Sellers, we see him through the warped and biased mind of a writer who is more attempting to show off his vocabulary than actually tell the reader anything about the character.
Lewis' inability to adhere to any time frame is both frustrating and distracting. He jumps aimlessly from marriage to marriage and movie to movie in order to justify points he has not effectively articulated. Thus, the reader is never presented with a coherent discription of anything (besides Lewis' own bizarre and tedious conclusions). Sadly, after reading this book, one is left without any more concrete information than one came in with.
Finally, for a man obsessed with research, he has developed a knack to warp and skew quotes in order to make them say entirely different things than they appear to have been intended. In the end, the quotes are just another facet of Sellers that Lewis manipulates to further advance his nebulous points.
Frustrating, uninformative, and ridiculous on every level; for a man that claims to have such an interest in Sellers he ought to be ashamed at what he has written. However, it is a testament to Sellers, the man, that even the little bit of him that the reader glimpses through this book is enough to get them through all of Lewis' surrounding garbage. No matter what, if you want to actually get any legitimate information about Peter Sellers this book is to absolutely be avoided.
Rating:
Summary: Facinating subject, annoying writer
Review: When I read a biography I want to be transported into the life of the subject, and follow along as that life unfolds. I don't want the author's presence there at all, unless it's to sum up his or her thoughts towards the end of the book. But in this book Roger Lewis doesn't let you forget for one second that it is he (Roger Lewis) writing the book. He fills it with enormous amounts of unnecessary information, information on how he wrote the book, his inane interpretations of Peter Sellers behavior (on page 170: "Seller's predilection for signs and symbols directed at him from beyond the grave....imply his basic comtempt for human life and reason." on page 183: "(Sellers') telescope, topsy-turvily fixed on the inverted clockface of Big Ben, is symbolic, surely? Sellers always wanted to outwit time; to show himself indifferent to it's distructiveness."), all too frequent mentions of himself (on page 197: "Had you been leaning over the railings of the little footbridge .....you would have seen an interesting sight. Along the edge....two characters approach.....Kenneth Griffin is remembering his old colleague, Sellers; his companion on this occasion -namely, the present author - is doing his best, whilst clambering thorough bush and briar, to take mental notes on the speach."), and the annoying habit of often discribing in detail photographs that do not appear in the book, that would have been better simply reproduced without the long discriptions, which, of course, include Lewis' thoughts on what the people in them might have been feeling at the time the photos were taken. If the subject matter of this book weren't as interesting as Peter Sellers is, it would have proven almost unreadably irritating. Lewis' constant editorializing would be better suited to a short article, but is impossible over the length of a book.
Rating:
Summary: I read this book so you won't have to
Review: Whilst this book did not make me physically ill, it has come closer than anything I have ever read.
Firstly, the book is interminably long- 890 of the 1050 pages are devoted to the years up to 1963, effectively dealing with the first ten years of Sellers' significant work. The years from 1963 to 1980 (from marriage to Britt Ekland) are rushed through on the excuse that Sellers was basically repeating himself. I suspect that the real reason is that the long suffering publishers balked at the prospect of a further 1,000 pages. The most infuriating thing is that having laboured through the author's endless deviations and detours (is anyone interested in 4 pages on Lewis' views of the non-Sellers Kubrick films), he explains finally that the style was deliberately artful, and that he had inserted a fallible narrator into the text. Whilst this may be a thrilling joke for anyone reading for a degree in English, it is too glib and does not excuse Lewis' appalling writing style. Not since Will Self has an author so delighted in obscure words; the book is padded with endless footnotes and agents' letters (most of which are simply source material and not interested other than to an entertainment lawyer. Lewis' insertion of his own opinions and 'goonish' sense of humour grates more than I can describe. Lewis's essential point is that Sellers was a mother-loving monster who was dreadful to his family and anyone he worked with. Repetition adds little, and the organisation of the book is so chaotic that I began to feel as if I had read the plot of 'Being There' over ten times by the end of this book. Sheer bloody mindedness got me through this mess of a book. How it ever came to be published is beyond me. It is a testament to the arrogance of the author and the feebleness of the editor (was there one?) to control this beast.
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