Retro Bio Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask by Peter Evans

If The Mask Behind the Mask was intended to be a colorful portrait of actor-comic Peter Sellers, the impression it leaves behind is really only a negative. According to author Peter Evans, Sellers' short, unhappy life resulted in little beyond a somewhat respectable body of work.

Tell-all books are tempting to read, but they can leave readers feeling uncomfortable after reading all the embellished details. They are unpleasant attempts at literary voyeurism -- for a few hours readers pry into the author's rendition of his or her subject's private life. Sellers tried to convince Evans not to publish it, but Evans thought he was too far into the project to stop (the first edition was published in 1968). He quotes Sellers quite a bit, though the book was never "authorized." And he considered himself a friend of Sellers.

As Evans tells it, there wasn't much of Sellers to like. He viewed him as a man driven by a stage mother to seek the limelight, his life and mentality becoming increasingly unraveled in proportion to his wealth and fame. Sellers' mother Peg, once a famous stage performer in her own right, quit her career to raise him. His mother's dominance over his personality, according to the author's psychoanalysis, remains the book's theme. He believed Sellers' mother left him a spoiled child, and he would continue to act like a spoiled adult, spurred on by a catered Hollywood lifestyle. Disappointingly, Evans wrote only a chapter on Sellers' years on The Goon Show, which influenced the cast of Monty Python. It was one of the happiest times in his life, and after all, readers would find happiness boring.

Evans has highlighted one or two of Sellers' redeeming qualities, like his generosity in buying expensive gifts for friends; for the most part he has sketched him as insecure, immature, a hypochondriac, and vengeful, his main hobby writing "s*it lists" of his enemies. He shows Sellers was so sensitive if someone in a film crew looked at him in a way he perceived was disapproving, he would demand the person be fired from the set.

The last chapter is rushed, as though Evans tried to cram in new information for the re-release of the book soon after Sellers' died of a heart attack in July 1980. Apparently, Evans didn't interview Sellers' widow and three ex-wives directly, but he did interview former Goon Show members Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, and co-stars and co-workers Peter O'Toole, Roy Boulting and John Boulting, Harvey Orkin, Sellers' manager Dennis Selinger, and directors Joe McGrath and Robert Parrish.