Roger Lewis on The Life and Death of Peter Sellers: Goons, Ghosts, and Destructive Genius

On this episode, we welcome back Roger Lewis, whose deeply researched and gleefully idiosyncratic biographies of British performing artists have come to constitute a genre all their own.
Our subject is the book that began it all: his classic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, newly reissued in a hardback edition with a foreword by Steve Coogan. In its pages, Lewis makes the case that Sellers was, alongside Olivier, perhaps the finest British actor of the twentieth century — even as he remained one of the most impossible.
In our conversation, he conjures Sellers as a man without a core, a figure of astonishing mimicry in whom there was no enduring sense of self. From The Goon Show to The Ladykillers, from The Pink Panther to Dr. Strangelove and Being There, the magnificence of the performances remains undeniable. But so, too, is the destruction he left in his wake.

Hosted by Ryan Edgington.