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Peter himself once remarked on his own metamorphosis: “I fell in love with Sophia, and when I took a look at myself in the mirror I felt sick.”

Having had enough of the pink plastic wrap, Peter went on a diet of hard-boiled eggs and oranges. He’d already had his teeth capped.

As private affairs go, this one was public. Observing him on the set, Anthony Asquith said, “He looks like a boy with a pinup in his bedroom.” Peter took Sophia out to the elegant Fu Tong restaurant in Kensington, where he taught her the intricacies of Cockney rhyming slang. His friends began to hear stories of a rather more intimate nature. Graham Stark recalls the would-be private incidents Peter excitedly related to him: “I was given details of furtive meetings, of passion in the dressing room and even awkward (I would have thought totally impossible) gymnastics in the back seats of parked cars. I got it all. It was, to say the least, embarrassing.”

Peter’s family heard about it, too, since he would come home from the day’s shooting and report on Sophia’s every move in infatuated detail. One day she’d treat him badly, the next day she’d be charming, and Anne, Michael, and baby Sarah would be treated to it all over dinner. Oblivious to the role his family ought to have played in his life—that of his family—he shared with them his unbridled enthusiasm for his costar, the stupefying bombshell from Rome. Anne offers a simple explanation for her husband’s behavior: “He treated me as his mother: I should allow him to do whatever he wanted to do.”

He brought Sophia to Chipperfield, first for a large catered party in her honor, then for smaller gatherings. At one of them she played Ping-Pong with Michael, who didn’t like her very much. After all, even a child could plainly see what she was doing to his father and what he was doing to himself and his family.

Anne recalls that Peter “brought her to the house quite often, usually with her husband, Carlo Ponti, and she was absolutely stunning and extremely charming. I didn’t take much notice at first when he told me he was in love with her. But then he’d be lying in bed and say her spirit was coming into the room.”

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One Saturday night during the production of The Millionairess £750,000 worth of Sophia’s jewels were stolen from the house in which she was staying in Hertfordshire. The police summoned Pierre Rouve, one of the producers of the film, to the studio on Sunday, and he stayed there dealing with the ensuing media turmoil and legal complications all the way through until Monday morning, at which point Sophia arrived on schedule in her Rolls Royce promptly at 7 A.M., ready for the day’s work. Everyone knew how upset she was—the jewelry was uninsured—but according to Rouve she was a complete professional and “carried on as though nothing had happened.” But, Rouve continues, “Later that morning somebody else’s nerves cracked—Peter Sellers’s. He fainted and had to be taken to the hospital.”

Asquith and his team spent the rest of the day taking close-ups of Sophia, who, despite the trauma she had just suffered, never looks anything short of magnificent in the final cut. But Peter, when released from the hospital, didn’t go back to the studio, nor did he return home. He went to Asprey and bought his love a £750 bracelet with which to begin her new collection.

• • •

Sophia had a bodyguard named Basilio. Peter described him years later: “He was a sort of watchdog. . . . He said to me, ‘When the husband he finds out about this there will be trouble!’ ”

But the question lingers unanswered to this day: What exactly did Carlo Ponti have to find out about? Some of Sellers’s friends, Spike Milligan among them, believed his stories at the time and swore that he and Sophia Loren enjoyed a torrid affair during the filming of The Millionairess. Others, like Graham Stark, think it was all in Peter’s head.

Dimitri de Grunwald: “There is nothing that will convince me that Sophia returned his passion with anything more than the