Let No Man Write My Epitaph...I'll Film It Myself: Part IV

When faced with the inevitable, actors are sometimes offered the privileged opportunity to look death in the eyes and carve their own epitaph. Since fate is fickle, there are, unfortunately, instances when an actor ‘s last hurrah is bluntly realized as a swan song gone wrong.

It looks as if the last big-screen appearance by Elizabeth Taylor, one of the last reigning queens from Hollywood’s golden age and a living historical link to the classical era of contract players at MGM, will be her role as Mrs. Slaghoople, Fred Flintstone’s antagonistic mother-in-law, in the who-asked-for-it 1994 live action version of Hanna-Barbera’s "The Flintstones."

Equally lamentable would be Sean Connery’s decision to retire after the less-than-rousing "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," the 2003 whitewashing of the dark steampunk comic book series, notable for the star’s utterance of the British expletive "bloody" in seemingly every other line of dialogue and for the behind-the-scenes conflicts between Connery and the director (allegedly leading to raised fists), which seemed especially speculative considering that Connery himself was the film’s executive producer.

Quite simply, Laurel and Hardy - rail-thin, British-born Stan Laurel and hefty but remarkably agile American Oliver Hardy - became one of the most popular comedy teams of early Hollywood, successfully making the transition from silent movies to talking shorts and feature films, from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.

Between 1941 and 1945, Laurel and Hardy made eight more movies in Hollywood, each notably weaker than the previous, lazily reworking old, familiar comedy routines. The painfully sad truth was that the boys were exhausted. During these years of World War II, the younger comedy team of Abbott and Costello were rapidly becoming the audience favorite, their combination of fast-paced action and lively songs striking a chord with wartime tastes. According to William K. Everson, author of The Films of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello delivered what the public wanted and "captured the juvenile market which didn’t remember the vintage Laurel and Hardy classics and…wasn’t too impressed by their current output."

Seven years after their last U.S. film, "The Bullfighters" (1945), Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy starred in their final motion picture, "Atoll K," a production that seemed doomed from the onset due to a limited budget and communication roadblocks between a multilingual cast and crew.

Long revered as major artists throughout Europe, Laurel and Hardy had enjoyed touring the continent in live performances in the late 1940s. They found themselves repeatedly mobbed by adoring fans wherever they traveled. By 1950, post-World War II British, French and Italian governments were eager to revive their film industries, and a comedy starring the beloved, if aging, Laurel and Hardy seemed a guaranteed hit.

The threadbare plot involved Laurel’s inheritance of a uranium-rich island in the Pacific and the ensuing mayhem aboard a leaky yacht on a storm-tossed voyage and on the atoll itself, which is ultimately impounded for unpaid taxes. The two stars were initially intrigued by the notion, unusual and uncertain as it was, of working in an international production. The supporting cast was to feature legendary French film comedian Fernandel, Italian comic actor Toto and sultry French actress Simone Simon. (In the end, none of these promised stars materialized, replaced by second- and third-string talent.)

The money seemed good, and the planned shooting schedule was for two months. Ida Laurel, Stan’s widow, told biographer John McCabe, "I’m hardly likely to forget the date we left for France and the date we returned - April 1, 1950, and April 1, 1951. But there was no April Fooling about that terrible year. That bloody picture was supposed to take twelve weeks to make, and it took twelve months."

Who’s in charge here? Problem was, no one was in control. French director Leo Joannon, who would appear on the set wearing a pith helmet, whimsically used different megaphones depending on the shot and once spent three days filming a lake because it struck him as extraordinarily photogenic. Much to Joannon’s chagrin, John Berry, an American director of taut melodramas, was recruited as a co-director, although his participation was dusted under the carpet because of his eventual blacklisting in the U.S. as one of the "unfriendly" Communists working in Hollywood.

Oliver Hardy’s health began to suffer during the drawn-out production. Heat and exhaustion resulted in the flu, complicated by an irregular heartbeat, stirring concern that he wouldn’t be able to finish filming. His already heavy bulk ballooned to 330 pounds. Stan Laurel, on the other hand, was losing weight at an alarming rate and developed prostate problems. He got dysentery from catered food, and his weight dropped from 165 to 114 pounds. He could only work for 30 minutes at a time before his stamina waned.

"Atoll K" was released in France and Italy in November 1951, in England (as "Robinson Crusoeland") the following year, and in the U.S. in December 1954. The American version, retitled "Utopia," was cut to delete most of the footage involving the secondary romantic leads. The New York Times reviewer, who called it "hectic silliness," noted, "Mr. Laurel appears woefully haggard…The boys never should have left home."

After a brief, limited release, the film, much to the relief of the stars, virtually vanished. Nobody made the effort to copyright the production in the U.S., and as a result of its status in public domain, it has since become the most easily available Laurel and Hardy film for home viewing.

After losing weight to the point where he became unrecognizable, Oliver Hardy suffered a severe stroke in September 1956 which left his right side paralyzed. He couldn’t speak and required round-the-clock care. Laurel visited him often as Hardy lived the rest of his days in his mother-in-law’s house in Burbank, California. He died August 7, 1957, age 65.

Stan Laurel, who made a full recovery after the "Atoll K" debacle, spent his final years in a small apartment with his wife in a Santa Monica hotel. Always appreciative of fans, he would devote much time personally responding to mail. His phone number was listed in the directory, much to the surprise of fans who discovered they could speak with him.

Laurel gave Jerry Lewis suggestions for the latter’s debut as a director in 1960’s "The Bellboy." Lewis’ character, who remains silent until the film’s end, was named Stanley. Laurel received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 1961. Ill and unable to attend, he had requested that Lewis accept the award for him, but for reasons of its own, the Academy insisted on Danny Kaye. Laurel was offered a cameo role in director Stanley Kramer’s "comedy-to-end-all-comedies," "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," but declined, perhaps not so much because of vanity due to his advanced age but because he preferred not to appear without his longtime friend and partner, Oliver Hardy.

Stan Laurel died at the age of 74 February 23, 1965, days after suffering a heart attack. The story goes that at his funeral, Buster Keaton (whose own passing was one year away) was overheard saying, "Chaplin wasn’t the funniest, I wasn’t the funniest, this man was the funniest."

Such was Laurel’s legacy for subsequent comedians (Dick Van Dyke, pictured above with Laurel, an unabashed fan who would often imitate him, delivered the eulogy at Laurel’s funeral) that Peter Sellers reportedly acknowledged studying Laurel’s speech patterns for his Academy Award-nominated role as Chance the gardener in 1979’s "Being There."

Sellers first made a name for himself as a costar, with fellow comedians Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, on "The Goon Show" (above), a popular British radio program that aired from 1951 to 1960. The show, which featured ludicrous plotlines, parodying everything under the sun and blending surreal humor with puns, catchphrases and bizarre sound effects, influenced "Monty Python’s Flying Circus," The Firesign Theatre, even The Beatles. In a piece for The New York Times, John Lennon wrote, "Their humor was the only proof that the world was insane."

Enigmatically confounding in real life, Peter Sellers often publicly claimed to have no identity of his own beyond the roles he played. His life offscreen was rife with crises and chaos, including emotional problems with women and family and substance abuse. Those who knew him and worked with him would describe him as demanding, difficult, bitterly jealous of friends, sometimes downright certifiably insane. Peter Hall, who directed Sellers onstage, said that "it’s not enough…in this business to have talent. You have to have talent to handle the talent. And that I think Peter did not have."

Twin brothers John and Roy Boulting, who directed Sellers in a handful of films, including "I’m All Right Jack" (above, with Terry-Thomas), the 1959 comedy that won Sellers a British Academy Film Award for Best Actor, recalled him as "a human disaster area," as capricious as a spoiled child whose life "teetered between total narcissism and total insecurity."

His strained relationship with director and occasional friend Blake Edwards, who made five "Pink Panther" films featuring Sellers as the blithely inept Inspector Clouseau (a role the actor despised despite the lucrative rewards), became the stuff of Hollywood lore. The two often refused to speak to each other while filming in what Edwards later remarked was "a real love-hate relationship."

Almost immediately after the publication of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There, Peter Sellers launched an impassioned crusade to star in the screen version, sending several posts to the author and director Hal Ashby, signing them with the fictional main character’s name "Chance." In an interview for BBC television, Sellers maintained that more than anything else, he wanted to play the role of the simplistic, man-child gardener addicted to watching TV.

Portraying Sellers in the 2004 HBO movie based on Roger Lewis’ 1995 biography The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Geoffrey Rush (best known as Captain Barbossa in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films) says of Being There, "The main character is a man with no self. No discernible personality. I find myself thinking about this man a great deal…about how marvelous his life must be. He has no future, no past. No responsibilities. He’s simple, boring, an absolute blank. People expect nothing from him and love it when they get just that."

During filming, in an often annoying attempt to stay in character, Sellers declined interviews with the media and icily distanced himself from his costars. On the other hand, he found his experience on the film both humbling and powerful. He was delighted to work with the likes of such Hollywood veterans as Melvyn Douglas, reverently exclaiming to his friend, Graham Stark, "Do you know, he played opposite Greta Garbo three times!"

"Being There" garnered Sellers his best reviews since the 1960s. Considered by a number of critics to be "the crowning triumph of Peter Sellers’ remarkable career," his characterization was praised as achieving "the pinpoint-sharp exactitude of nothingness. It is a performance of extraordinary dexterity." The role earned him a Golden Globe Award and his second Academy Award nomination (he had been previously nominated for playing three separate parts in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 atomic age satire "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"). The Oscar went to Dustin Hoffman for "Kramer vs. Kramer." A disappointed Sellers blamed the loss on the inclusion, during the end credits for "Being There," of humorous outtakes, hailing back to the actor’s less-than-fond memories of the "Pink Panther" films.

A reunion dinner in London with "Goon Show" cohorts Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe was set for July 25, 1980. Three days earlier, Sellers had a massive heart attack and fell into a coma. He died after midnight on July 24. He was 54. In his will, he requested that Glenn Miller’s jazz standard "In the Mood" be played at his funeral, because he hated it.

Before he passed away, Sellers had completed one last movie, "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu." In The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, author Roger Lewis commented, "If only he’d died after ‘Being There,’ for his own sake. He cannot have been pleased with himself for living life as it should not be lived; for behaving as one should not behave. The fear of life, the fear of death, the fear of human contact, the fear of loneliness. The sadness is in considering how gifted he was, and how much mental disturbance and unhappiness there was by the end. (His fate ought to put anybody off wanting to be a star.)"

Fu Manchu, a sinister overlord of a secret society of criminals, was created by British author Sax Rohmer (who called his character "the yellow peril incarnate in one man") in a series of novels published in the early half of the 20th century. Fu Manchu’s doggedly determined nemesis was Dennis Nayland Smith, a Scotland Yard inspector obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes (complete with his own Dr. Watson, named Dr. Petrie). In 1932, Boris Karloff famously portrayed Fu Manchu, and Christopher Lee assumed the role in five movies in the 1960s.

Peter Sellers’ vision for "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" had him taking on the roles of both the now 168-year-old Fu Manchu (above), madly pursuing a youth-restoring elixir, and Nayland Smith (below), stirred from addle-brained retirement (anywhere he goes he pushes an old lawn mover). According to biographer Roger Lewis, Sellers desired to make "a super-dooper version of ‘The Goon Show.’" The actor enthusiastically told an interviewer that "it’s like the early ‘Goon Shows.’ It has all the comedy of the ridiculous." ("Fred Manchu" was the name of a character on the original radio program.)

Director Piers Haggard, who succeeded dismissed director Richard Quine (a hapless soul who had worked with Sellers on the disappointing 1979 comedic remake of "The Prisoner of Zenda"), told Roger Lewis that Orion, the studio bankrolling "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu," had already spent over a million dollars and "were willing to do almost anything to please (Sellers)…Everything was gift-wrapped to be sold to Peter, in the most elaborate way."

Shortly after filming started, Haggard wanted to discuss with Sellers "the myriad artistic details to do with making a film." Haggard described the meeting as "puzzling and frightening." Sellers, sitting in a darkened room, "looked dreadful and sad," according to Haggard. "He sat like a graven image, very somberly. He was on his own. I later looked back and saw this moment as a premonition of the insanity I had got myself into. Because from that point, everything became worse."

Haggard noted, "Increasingly, I, as the director, became angry and despairing at not being able to have a normal relationship with my leading actor…I wanted to be able to help him, but he would not open himself to me…even though he’d said to Orion, ‘I’ll only do this with Piers, so f--- you.’"

After four months, and with not more than a week left in production, Sellers fired Haggard and started reshooting much of the footage himself. Haggard recalled that he had "completely failed to get a performance out of him. Normally, you find ways of working with people - but he was unable and unwilling to do this." The film, in Haggard’s words, "was somehow edited and finished off and released after he died…The sadness is considering how gifted he was, and how much mental disturbance and unhappiness there now was, at the end."

"The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" does have fleeting moments of off-kilter whimsy (such as the image of Nayland Smith’s countryside cottage becoming airborne beneath a giant balloon), but sadly, it remains, for the better part of its 101-minute running time, painfully humorless and occasionally offensive. There is obvious racism on display (as there was in the original novels), in characters’ names and in the otherwise respected Sid Caesar’s presence as a cop named Joe Capone whose dialogue is peppered with references to "chinks." (Fans of the "Pink Panther" movies may recall Inspector Clouseau referring to Cato as "my little yellow friend.")

No amount of old-age makeup, whether it’s on the ancient Fu Manchu or the doddering Nayland Smith, could mask the tired face underneath the latex and powder of a melancholy man who was, in fact, aged beyond his years. Which makes the scenes of a decrepit Fu Manchu leching after costar Helen Mirren (20 years younger than Sellers) all the more uncomfortable. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Hugh Hefner was an executive producer.)

Most embarrassing of all is the movie's jaw-dropping climax when any semblance of a plot or logic is jettisoned as the suddenly rejuvenated Fu Manchu performs an Elvis Presley parody.

According to writer Roger Lewis, "the story, as if it weren’t operatic enough, doesn’t even end with ‘The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.’ Sellers was reaching new and spectacular peaks of fever and frustration on ‘The Romance of the Pink Panter’ (which was to be his revenge on Blake Edwards)."

Steve Bach, a senior vice president and Head of Worldwide Productions at United Artists, recalled that Clive Donner, who directed 1965’s "What’s New Pussycat?" starring Sellers, Peter O’Toole and Woody Allen (who also wrote the screenplay), was set to direct "The Romance of the Pink Panther," but, according to Bach, "Clive’s very decency was a disturbing factor to Peter who had worked it out in his head that if you weren’t overtly trying to f--- him you were doing so covertly, so there was simply no way of winning with him…Clive knew all of this, and he probably knew that deep down Pete had the bully’s mistrust and contempt for anyone who gives in to him…Clive did that - as Clive out of compassion would - and…Peter saw that as duplicitous and/or weak. These may sound mutually exclusive, but nothing was so logical with Peter as to have been governed by normal patterns of thought. He was, quite simply, deeply unbalanced, if not committable: that was the source of his genius and his truly quite terrifying aspects as manipulative and hysteric."

Bach summed it up by stating, "My personal fondness for him and my admiration for him as an actor do not override my feelings that he was on very important levels a monster and I say that with all the compassion I may possess."