The actor was born 100 years ago – and his performances still induce hysteria today. Fans and collaborators like Michael Palin, Woody Allen and Lesley Anne-Down explain why
Michael Palin
Along with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers lit up my teenage years. I knew that Connie Francis would never return my love, but Spike and Peter delivered something almost as good – and that was deep, satisfying and highly contagious laughter. Laughter that made me so happy I forgot about my spots.
Spike was the imaginative genius who wrote The Goon Show but it was Sellers who brought me to tears with his gallery of unforgettable characters: Major Bloodnok, Bluebottle, Henry Crun, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne.
He was my hero long before I knew what he looked like. On my first day at Oxford university, I made a lifetime friendship founded on a mutual adoration of the album Songs for Swingin Sellers (with a pair of legs swinging from a branch on the cover). Sellers was not just a man of many voices, he was a gifted actor, and each voice came with a character. The more I heard him the more I wanted to be like him. He showed me there was something far more important than sport and girls and modern history class, and that was making people laugh.
