When Powell Met Sellers

One of the regular treats of my boyhood was going to see the latest Peter Sellers film as it came out. My father was a huge fan, and so was I, right from the get-go. I remember seeing a string of wonderful comedies – I'm All Right Jack, Two Way Stretch, The Wrong Arm of the Law, Heavens Above!, Dr Strangelove, the early Pink Panther movies – in big, packed, smoke-wreathed cinemas. Lolita (he was Clare Quilty) and Being There (perhaps his masterpiece) came later. I was fascinated by the staggeringly gifted Sellers, and have remained intrigued by what I knew of his strange, complex personality – and by the fact that, for all his talent, he made so few really good films, and some insufferable ones. For some while I've been meaning to read Roger Lewis's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which has a reputation as a masterpiece of is genre. I loved Lewis's biog of Charles Hawtrey, and whatever else of his I've come across – including his bracingly honest 'Books of the Year' – so what was…