Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [79]
A high fee helped as well. Carried away by Peter Sellers’s exponentially increasing popularity, the agent Leonard Urry (representing the producer, Dimitri de Grunwald) is said by Terry-Thomas to have made Sellers an offer of £85,000. Terry, who was a friend of Urry’s, asked Urry why on earth he’d offered so much. Urry answered, “I only offered what I thought was a fair price.” Terry then told Urry that he could probably have gotten Peter for £50,000, since he, Terry, knew “exactly what Peter had been earning up to then. After that his price soared.” It certainly did, though Alexander Walker reports that Sellers actually was paid a flat fee of £50,000, “of which £17,000 went to Wolf Mankowitz” as part of the formation of the production company he and Mankowitz were trying to put together at the time. (As a point of comparison and a measure of their relative statures at the time, Sophia got $200,000 and a percentage of the profits.)
The film was to be directed by the respected Anthony Asquith, produced by de Grunwald and distributed, they all hoped, by Twentieth Century-Fox, though Fox executives tried to talk de Grunwald out of Sophia Loren in favor of Ava Gardner. De Grunwald had been friendly with Peter for several years already. Some time earlier, in fact, he’d taken Peter to a Russian nightclub in Paris. The émigré producer was dazzled by Peter’s disarming nature as a changeling: “We’d only been there two minutes when Peter became one hundred times more Russian than I am—and I’m very Russian. He went absolutely wild—nostalgic, sentimental, gay, tragic, romantic—everything a Russian is. The gypsies came over to our table, and Peter sang with them and cried during all the sad songs, and in half an hour he was dancing madly all over the place and smashing empty vodka glasses against the wall.”
Now they wanted him to be the love interest in a lavish Sophia Loren comedy. And so he did it. In Technicolor.
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Sophia’s arrival in London, on a boat train from Paris, was heralded long in advance; the press was primed. On the day of the event, the producers threw a party for the express purpose of recording the meeting of Europe’s most voluptuous star with Britain’s funniest comic, both set to star in a gown-filled but artistically respectable top-of-the-line motion picture.
Sophia was on one side of the ballroom, glorious; Peter, armed with flowers and champagne, was on the other, a nervous wreck. “I don’t normally act with a romantic glamorous woman,” he told a fellow guest. “You’d be scared, too. She’s a lot different from Harry Secombe.”
The moment had to happen, though—the press were getting itchy—and when it did it was forced and stilted. Only after the photographers demanded it did Peter provide Sophia with a kiss on the cheek. Later that evening, when he got home, Anne asked him what she was like; “Ugly, with spots,” he said.
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Filming began. In an early scene in The Millionairess, Peter’s character, the selfless Dr. Kabir, minister to the wretched of the earth, rubs lotion on the naked back of the world’s richest and most beautiful woman. By the time Anthony Asquith called “cut,” Peter was wildly in love.
Starring with Sophia Loren in a romantic comedy appealed so greatly to Peter because by 1960 he wanted to be someone he never imagined he could be: a romantic lead. The Millionairess provided the flip side of Lionel Meadows in Never Let Go. “I was there at the time,” his friend Bryan Forbes declares. “It stemmed from the moment he opened a paper and it said, ‘Mastroianni—Peter Sellers with Sex Appeal.’ And that plunged him into a deep sorrow and angst and he immediately went on a crash diet and changed his whole personality. He was a fat boy struggling to get out.” Richard Lester puts it