Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [178]
“It was a scene in which each of the actors had, by that time, established his own little section of the room. So I decided, Sellers was here, so I’d start there and work my way around the room and get to him last. When I finally got around to him, he’d fallen asleep. I woke him up and said I wasn’t feeling too well and we’d continue it tomorrow.
“At 3:00 o’clock that morning, I got a phone call from Peter saying, ‘You didn’t like my wig, did you?’
“I said that, no, I thought it was wrong in the circumstance, and I explained the thing about the aging and the changing and the icons and that kind of stuff, and he agreed, and that was the end of it. He was amazingly helpful and sympathetic, once we got his money off to Hare Krishna.”
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In the film, Rouquet eventually commits suicide. Rees describes the long take in which he filmed the scene: “He does it in such a careful, methodical, considerate, kind sort of way. He’s a schoolteacher—a compassionate and careful man. The candles are running. He looks at his photograph. (That’s his old school, you see. I mean, you don’t know that, but he knows it.) He’s very tidy. He puts everything back in the little box, thinks a bit, carefully rolls his sleeve back, opens his box, and gets from it a knife. He puts his hand into a sack of flour; he’s neat—he doesn’t want to bleed anywhere. He puts the knife in, pauses, and winces as he’s cutting himself. His hand comes out, and you can just see a little blood and flour, and he just puts his hand on the candle, and it fizzles out.”
Bert Mortimer, who witnessed the filming, later said that “he was so wrapped up in the part I believed he actually might do it. And Peter was so nervous himself that it might actually have come about.”
Clive Rees sums up his association with Peter: “I knew him very well as the man who played Rouquet—as an actor who was fantastic to work with, who was very sympathetic, polite, and physically quite touchy. I mean, he would hold you. I don’t mean hug you, like we do today. But he would touch you. We had a close relationship, but it was about what we were doing, and that’s where it began and ended. I was aware that I was working with a genius—not just a great actor. A genius. He was different. Aznavour is, I think, a really good actor. He’s an entertainer, a really wonderful bloke. But I wouldn’t use the word genius. Peter had that.”
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By the time The Blockhouse was being filmed in the summer of 1972, Peter’s marriage to Miranda was essentially over, though it took a long time for the legal formalities to be arranged. Hans Moellinger recalls Peter’s emotional state, the ambivalence of a paranoiac: “We were in Munich. He was still with Miranda then and was always speaking in cheerless terms that he was afraid that she was cheating on him. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, he said, ‘Hans, I must go back to Dublin!’ I said it was impossible—night flights are forbidden in Munich. But he said, ‘You must get me a plane, I have to go back immediately, Miranda is cheating on me!’ I said, ‘Wait until morning, you’ll fly back and you’ll see that. . . .’ ‘No no no no!’ he said. ‘Get the plane!’
“We tried to get a plane in Munich, in Berlin—it was impossible. Finally we got one in Geneva. The plane came to Munich at 2:00 A.M.—for about 37,000 Swiss francs. I called the director of the airport and told him that Peter Sellers, who had had a heart attack—everybody knew he had a weak heart—had to get to his doctor in Dublin. He said, ‘I’ll try to organize something.’ At about 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning, I went with my girlfriend and Peter to the airport. We were sort of dragging him into the hall, left and right, holding him, schlepping him through to the plane. But now the problem