Geoffrey Rush is epic , showing his quality from the very beginning of the film , he manages to pass all the war of emotions that were in Peter Sellers' mind capturing the audience's attention . I think that Geoffrey should have taken a leading role Oscar for his role as Peter Sellers.I now know that he is one of my favorite actors and i want to see many other films with him in the leading role.

How good was Peter Sellers? When I was an adolescent I saw a commercial for the upcoming showing of "A Shot in the Dark" (curiously, the best of the Pink Panther movies). It showed clips of Elke Sommer running around "nude" (what passed for "nude" in them days. I tuned in for Elke Sommer and quickly became obsessed with the weird character of Inspector Clouseau as limned by Peter Sellers.I became a Sellers nut, watching all his movies, collecting "Goon Show" tapes as they came on the market. But I wondered, who was this man, who had so inhabit these bizarre characters? So when THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS came out I devoured it from cover to cover.The biography THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS was a peculiar book that drew a shocking conclusion: that Peter Sellers was evil. Fortunately, Sellers is not portrayed as evil in the movie. But it does seem that Sellers, who yearned to be a leading-man type, was not the leading man even in his own life. He was a character role.The movie is hardly for Sellers neophytes. Anyone unfamiliar with Sellers' films or characters -- particularly in his early British classics like "The Ladykillers" or "Carlton-Browne of the F.O."-- might be confused by the images this flick focuses on. Yet anyone more intimately familiar with Sellers life and films might be put off by the whole.The movie starts at a point the real Sellers (probably peering over his shoulder through a fog of nostalgia) thought of as his happiest time, making the BBC-radio "Goon Show" (still repeated, still one of the funniest shows on the air). It ends with a remake (and an added bit of symbolism) of his last scene of the movie "Being There." Sandwiched in between are snippets of Sellers' selfishness and the unpleasantness he imposed on others.Whether the book or the film capture the real Sellers will never be known. Sellers famous said there was no real him -- on his "Muppet Show" appearance he said he had his "me" surgically removed. This is arrant nonsense. Sellers was all about himself. He lived a selfish life and died without being surrounded by friends and family. Apparently there was a "real" Sellers but he never acknowledged it because that person was not very nice (hilariously yet poignantly summed in this film by Sellers assuring his little daughter he still loved her, "Just not as much as I love Sophia Loren" (Loren to this day admits to an affair and I think, like the book and movie has it, it was "all in the mind."The most important question for this movie is, how does Geoffrey Rush come across as Sellers? In some scenes, Rush bears an almost frightening resemblance to pictures of the real Sellers. And he is uncannily able to recreate some of Sellers' film performances. Personally, I would like to have seen more time spent on Sellers' films (particularly "Casino Royale," which the book claims Sellers destroyed, and which ultimately, in a nice bit of karma, almost destroyed Sellers' career).In the end, however, while a brilliant actor like Rush may imitate Sellers' creations to an alarming degree, and while Rush is himself hilarious in some of his own parts, he cannot duplicate the comedic genius that was Sellers on film. He can look eerily like Sellers but he's never particularly funny in Sellers' roles.Sellers might well have been the miserable git described in the book and the movie, though I think both book and movie are at fault for psychoanalyzing a dead person. That doesn't mean they are wrong (though original "Goon" Michael Bentine says a lot that has been said about Sellers is nonsense, while former wife and bombshell Britt Eckland says the movie doesn't go far enough! Take your pick.) Though Sellers disingenuously protested his own lack of a genuine persona, and though a person is not merely a series of syndromes that can be so blithely deconstructed, Sellers might well be the epitome of the old joke about television: that it brings into your living room people you wouldn't have in your house.What made Sellers was not so much his ability to "inhabit" his characters as to make them,when he was at his best, incredibly funny. And in this, Rush, and the movie fails. Like Sellers, Rush beautifully "inhabits" his characters. But in this movie his character is the real Sellers, the man who was able to make miserable everyone he came into contact with personally. Rush is unable to go the next step and show how Sellers was able to take a little makeup and maybe a mustache and bring joy to millions who -- fortunately -- would never get to meet him personally.But as for a surfer version of Sellers' life, the movie is probably as good as it will ever get as far as bio-pics. Instead of giving actual "Goon" scrips they show anarchy on the "Goon" stage. Instead of showing Sellers' actual proposal to Britt, they have Ray Ellington's son singing "You Make Me Fell So Young" in a wacky and (dare I say?) "Goonish" sequence. Sellers in the movie doesn't come off as half as destructive as (if hearsay is to be believed) he actually was; but it also fails to show why he was loved--because when he was on screen in his best roles (which curiously end about the time of "The Pink Panther") he was the best slapstick artist since the silent era and incredibly funny.Also bad: Nigel Havers has a bit part as David Niven, with nearly nothing to do! Apparently Havers has the rights to one of Nivens' memoirs. Let us hope he is allowed to do it. What a waste of a perfectly good actor.

Biographical movies are always an interesting combination of reality and fiction. You can't tell the story with absolute truth, so you do your best to give the flavour. And here the idea is to give the flavour of the mass of insecurities and contradictions that was Peter Sellers.Let me say that the film is a very clever movie - well structured, well written, and imaginatively designed and directed in an alluring combination of historical reconstruction and surreal meta-reality.And then let me go on to say that Geoffrey Rush is absolutely superb (not that the rest of the cast isn't, but Rush does stand out). He is Peter Sellers. And his performance is so good that you will be astonished, as I still am, at how much a man who looks nothing like Peter Sellers looks so much like him - I think it is all in the performance.Brilliant.

'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' is quite an insightful film about the life of the great Sellers. It does not document every single fact about his life (I doubt any biopic can within a two or three hour time limit) and there are some discrepancies (e.g. time frame) but it does show the price he paid to achieve his state of greatness. In a way the man was obsessed with becoming a big star but at the same time he wanted to do his own thing. He wanted to be a star on his own term, doing his own thing but he failed to balance his work and personal life and this had a severe toll on his family. He became a self-centred bastard, cruel to everyone who was close to him yet he longed for their contact, especially Peg and Anne, and missed his children. Stephen Hopkins does a remarkable job by putting the story together on screen infusing it with intensity and humour. Geoffrey Rush does a phenomenal job playing Sellers (that too so accurately) and bringing him to life on screen. In addition, there is a strong physical resemblance and the way he captures Sellers's various characters and body language is particularly notable. Of the supporting cast, Emily Watson, Charlize Theron and Miriam Margolyes are excellent while John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci are quite adequate.'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' is a well-crafted movie and an effective (although not 100% accurate) portrayal of the tragic life of a great comedian and a great actor. The numerous references and imitations done so wonderfully by Rush serve as a wonderful tribute. But, I felt that two hours was not enough to explain the enigma of this man. We don't see anything about his life before movies. All we know is that he was a 'radio actor' and thus we never really get to the root of his unstable tortured personality.