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He then shines a light in Bob’s ear and tosses off his only good line in the now-trademarked Indian accent: “I’m looking in here—goodness gracious me!”

• • •

It was inevitable. He wanted to direct.

And so, Mr. Topaze (1961). Of course he also had to star.

Mr. Topaze came and went and never returned. The film currently exists in one print stored deep in the archives of the British Film Institute, its once-bright colors having faded to a nearly uniform shade of sick pink.

Based on Marcel Pagnol’s play Topaze, the film, a satirical comedy, traces the rise of Auguste Topaze (Sellers) from shy schoolteacher to corrupt business magnate. At first, Auguste is a saintly figure, teaching his young charges by day and, after school, taking on the task of private tutor to a familiar-looking young boy (Michael Sellers). “Money does not buy happiness,” he tells his students; “money is the trial of friendship.” He is rewarded for his moralism by getting fired. A wealthy couple (Herbert Lom and Nadia Gray) hires him to run a dummy corporation for them, but he proves to be so proficient at corrupt business practices that he takes over the company, becomes a millionaire, and seizes the couple’s chateau. At the end, one of his old schoolteacher colleagues leads a group of boys past the magnificent residence. The self-satisfied Topaze tells his old friend that he’s come to accept the criminal nature of the business world; he’s had to accept it, he says, since everything he has done since he left teaching is punishable by law.

“Has your money bought you happiness?” the friend asks.

And Topaze replies: “Has it bought me happiness?” He smiles and gestures to the grand chateau behind him. “It’s buying it now.”

The friend leaves Topaze standing alone on the terrace. Directing himself, Peter films this sardonic conclusion in extreme long shot, dwarfing himself on the vast CinemaScope screen.

He seemed upbeat during the production. His fee was substantial, £75,000 for directing and starring. “What I am really hoping for is that I will be able to achieve sufficient success as a director to give up acting entirely,” he told a reporter. “I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I’m such a dreadful clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, ‘Why doesn’t he get off? Why doesn’t he get off?’ I mean I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan’t be able to go on working.”

His friend Kenneth Tynan was writing a profile of him at the time, so Peter invited him to watch some dailies. Sellers’s response to himself was quite different then:

“Observing himself in the rushes, Sellers seemed to be watching a total stranger. ‘Look at that idiot!’ he would cry when Topaze bumped into something; or ‘Poor bastard!’ during a scene of edgy flirtation. And he would laugh, merrily and musically, shaking his head like a man at once baffled and amused by the behavior of someone he had never met.”

Billie Whitelaw, who played Topaze’s love interest early in the film, found Sellers very easy to work with, and in fact she stresses the point in her memoirs in a self-evident effort to correct Sellers’s postmortem reputation as nothing more than a buffoonish crank. Herbert Lom agrees: “We worked easily together. It was all charming and easy and natural.”

Still, looking back on his single experience of being directed by Peter, Herbert Lom declares simply that “he was not a director. He wasn’t particularly interested in directing. Why he directed I wouldn’t know.”

Lom goes on to explain that Sellers wasn’t inattentive to his fellow actors, he just didn’t perform any of the many other responsibilities of a film director: “He certainly tried to help us in acting the parts. He was one of the actors—he never really figured as the director. He was a colleague who helped us plan the scenes. I have no particular memories of him as an inspiring or irritating director. He was just Peter Sellers.”

Lom makes