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Her international-celebrity life dates to 1964, when Peter Sellers wooed and wed the unknown actress almost like a mail-order bride. All market data delayed 20 minutes. Check out what's clicking today in entertainment.In the upcoming BBC special titled “Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy” airing on May 9, the actress described the British comic icon, who suffered from drug and alcohol addiction, as controlling and mentally unstable, The 77-year-old alleged that Sellers would choose what she should wear and threatened her with divorce “every Friday night – and by Monday there would be a make-up lunch or present.”“He obviously suffered from or was bipolar, severely bipolar,” Ekland claimed. The litigation lasted years, Sellers countersuing 20th Century Fox for ‘mental distress and injury to his health’.Meanwhile, to make himself extra-virile in bed, Sellers, aged not quite 40, was taking ampoules of amyl nitrate, or poppers, which disrupted his metabolism — and on April 7, 1964, he suffered a series of heart attacks.Billy Wilder, who had not hit it off with his star, commented: ‘Heart attack?
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, I’d never let him see me wandering around in curlers or a dressing gown.’The compliant, cosy, deferential scene was undermined somewhat by Sellers’s feelings of morbid jealousy — and by the couple’s instant separationFor only two days after the wedding, Sellers was expected in Hollywood to begin making Kiss Me, Stupid, with director Billy Wilder. You can’t possibly go back to filming.’”When asked in the documentary if she was actually sick, Ekland responded, “Of course not.”“I was 21 years old, fit as a fiddle, but I had no choice,” she said.
He carried on getting married and divorced, treating women like cars or cameras, accessories he could replace without compunction when he was fed up.For all his craziness, however, there has not been a comic actor to touch him.From the The Goon Show to Ealing classics, Boulting Brothers films, work with Stanley Kubrick, Inspector Clouseau, all the way to Being There, Sellers remains a comic genius and it doesn’t much matter any more that he was a mean-spirited egomaniac.As for Britt, she became a Bond girl, and starred in Get Carter and The Wicker Man.
‘One minute you were flying high, the next you were running low.’Nothing came lower than his doomed efforts to turn her into his one big impossible love, Italian film star Sophia Loren.In 1967, Sellers and Britt went to Rome to make The Bobo, in which he was a singing matador and she was to be a seductress. “By the time we married [it] was probably little more than three weeks [later],” she said.The pair tied the knot in 1964. or redistributed. He’d bought everything you could possibly need as a woman who didn’t have any clothes, from evening gowns to bikini.
Britt was meant to work on Guns At Batasi, about a fictional military coup in East Africa, being shot at Pinewood.From LA, Sellers wrote a rather despairing, revealing letter: ‘I have a dreadful fear at the back of my mind that you might leave me . Sellers arranged for a professional 16mm film to be made, complete with a commentary by his friend, the actor David Lodge.Lodge was joint Best Man with Sellers’s long-time sidekick, the sycophantic actor Graham Stark, of whom John Le Mesurier had said: ‘Graham Stark is the only man in London with a flat up Peter Sellers’ bottom.’ The stills photographer was celebrity snapper Terry O’Neill.For the reception at Elstead, Sellers’ Surrey mansion, stuntmen from Shepperton Studios kept the Press away from the gates.
The bikini was actually of mink… I was floored.” ‘When he comes in at night,’ Britt said of her husband, ‘I have changed, combed my hair.
. When I arrived, he said, ‘I have a doctor here because you don’t look well.’ The doctor said, ‘She’s suffering strain and stress. He insisted she wear a black wig, like Loren’s.
English actor and comedian Peter Sellers proposed after seeing Britt Ekland's photograph in the paper and then meeting her in London.