Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [133]
In August, he mentioned to the Hollywood columnist Army Archerd another project in which he was most interested in participating. Charles Chaplin would direct the picture; Sophia Loren would costar. He hadn’t seen a screenplay yet, he said, but he was confident that it would be there when the time came. One month later, Chaplin began filming A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) with Sophia and Marlon Brando.
Then came Waterloo. “Is there any truth in Mike Connelly’s report that you want me to play Napoleon?” Peter cabled John Huston from the Hotel Maurice in Paris in late October. “If so, very interested.”
The next day Peter returned to Brookfield, where he received Huston’s unpunctuated reply a few days later: “Information is news to me but nevertheless a fine idea we have however already contacted Richard Burton regarding the role stop in case anything should go wrong may I please get in touch with you?”
Disappointed, Peter responded kindly but with a touch of self-protection: “Agree Burton would be marvelous casting and on second thoughts am not sure I would be right stop.” He tagged on a marvelously absurd philosophical conclusion: “However what is to be will be even if it never happens.”
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To the handsome tune of $25,000 a day, Bryan Forbes convinced Peter to appear for three days’ work on The Wrong Box, Forbes’s adaptation of a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne. Sellers’s role was, as the Financial Times described it, that of the “befuddled, cat-ridden abortionist.”
Dr. Pratt (coughing): “Yes, I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m all right. It’s just a fur ball, it’s nothing. Strange, I haven’t had fur for a fortnight.”
Forbes had asked Spike Milligan to appear in a small role as well for only a token fee, but Spike would have none of it. “Suddenly last year I woke up to the fact that everybody else was driving a Rolls Royce while I was driving a Mini Minor,” Spike told Forbes, “so I decided to put an end to it and go into this business strictly for money like everybody else. When I have got a Rolls Royce and money in the bank I will start doing it for kicks again, but not till then.”
Peter was in Rome when he got the script on June 10, but he didn’t go before the cameras until mid-November, when, as planned, he worked for three full days, sharing the doctor’s cramped attic office set with twenty-five hired cats. He plays his two all-too-brief scenes with Peter Cook, whose character, Morris Finsbury, turns to the decrepit and disreputable Dr. Pratt for a blank death certificate, which Finsbury intends to fill in later with the pertinent details. “All I want is the death certificate, Doctor,” Finsbury stresses impatiently. “Don’t we all,” Pratt replies while pouring himself another drink. Under a bulbous makeup nose and hideously pallid complexion stare two weary, vacant eyes. “I was not always as you see me now,” Pratt explains.
When Finsbury returns later that night, he has to rouse the doctor once again from his habitual slumbers. “I tell you the woman was already dead when I came in!” Pratt frantically cries, flustered at the brutal exposure of his own consciousness. Immediately after signing the death certificate to Finsbury’s great relief, Dr. Pratt uses a squeaking kitten as his inkblotter. “Particularly delirious are two passages with Peter Sellers,” Dilys Powell raved in the Sunday Times; “Peter Sellers is a positive gem, the finest thing in the film,” wrote Michael Thornton in the Sunday Express.
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Near the end of the year, Peter filmed a segment of a Granada television special, The Music