The Untold Truth Of The Pink Panther

While the franchise would eventually move on without him to support it, six of the first seven Pink Panther films owed much of their success to the talent of the eccentric and turbulent Peter Sellers, whose lifestyle choices ranged from the bizarre to the horrifically self-destructive, the latter of which likely had something to do with his early death.

Sellers suffered his first heart attack at the age of 38, just two months into his marriage with his second wife — Swedish actress Britt Ekland, who was 21 at the time. It's more than likely substance abuse contributed to his heart's precarious position. Not only was Sellers known to regularly abuse cocaine and alcohol, but both Sellers and his young wife would regularly consume amyl nitrite — better known as "poppers" — to enhance their performance in bed. 

Sellers' heart condition would continue to be an issue until his death, and his erratic behavior likely did little to help. Along with his substance abuse, Sellers preferred alternative methods of care, such as his daily sessions with a psychic. In more recent years, Sellers' ex-wife, Ekland, has said she suspected he suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. His infamous behavior on and off movie sets would certainly hint at some kind of serious mental health issues, including bragging about a — by all accounts — imaginary love affair with Sophia Loren and his belief that he was in psychic contact with the dead comedian Dan Leno.

Peter Sellers and writer/director Blake Edwards worked together quite a bit. Before Sellers' death in 1980, he and Edwards collaborated on six films — five of the Pink Panther movies and the 1968 comedy The Party. You might imagine the two were close friends, but according to what Edwards told The Express in 2010, you'd be very wrong.

"Sellers was nuts — really nuts," Edwards told The Express. As early as the first Pink Panther film, Edwards vowed to never work with Sellers again. The actor's unpredictable behavior included frequently not showing up for scenes (sometimes because he wasn't happy with the day's horoscope), waking up Edwards with phone calls in the middle of the night to assure him filming would go well the next day "because God had told him how to play it," and carrying on conversations with the dead. In spite of his frequent promises to sever all ties, Edwards continued to work with Sellers only because of the actor's singular talent.

But according to Edwards, Sellers' behavior on set never improved, and their relationship never got better. Describing Sellers' mental state during the filming of 1976's The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Edwards said, "If you went to an insane asylum, and you described the first inmate you saw, that's what Peter had become." Apparently, the hard feelings were mutual. "[Sellers] had a big emotional investment in me but hated that I was so responsible," Edwards said. At one point, the two resorted to only communicating through each others' assistants.  

Suffering a chronic heart condition for years, Peter Sellers died of a heart attack in 1980 at the age of 54, but the entertainment world wasn't quite done with him. Two years after his death, Trail of the Pink Panther was released, with the late Sellers once again starring as the ridiculous Inspector Jacques Clouseau. While new scenes were shot for Trail, most of the film is pieced together using deleted scenes from 1976's The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Edwards had wanted Strikes Again to be a three-hour film, but United Artists forced him to cut it in half, leaving him with a lot to work with in Trail.

Regardless, neither critics nor audiences were pleased with Trail, and it was a commercial bomb. And it wasn't just your average moviegoer who was unhappy. Shortly after Trail's release, Sellers' young widow, Lynne Frederick, sued Blake Edwards, MGM, and United Artists in London's high court — looking for $3 million in damages and hoping to have the film banned. Sellers, Frederick argued, had refused to have outtakes used while he was alive, and therefore, it was his estate — controlled by Frederick — who should have the last say on whether such scenes could be used after his death. The court agreed, awarding Frederick $1 million, while at the same time refusing to ban the film.

One of the more unique aspects of the Pink Panther films is that it popularized an animated character who — in spite of being, literally, a pink panther — has nothing narratively to do with any of the live-action films. With the exception of A Shot in the Dark and Inspector Clouseau, all of the films with Jacques Clouseau feature the pink feline during the opening credits sequence, accompanied by Henry Mancini's iconic score. While the cat had nothing to do with the stories — the "pink panther" referred to a priceless diamond — the animated sequences proved popular enough for the character to get his own spin-off series and films. 

The first time the cat took center stage was in the 1964 animated short The Pink Phink – the winner of that year's Oscar for Best Animated Short — in which the titular cat makes a painter's life difficult by replacing all of his blue paint with pink. Five years later, The Pink Panther Show debuted on NBC, and this was followed by a long series of animated shows, the most recent of which was 2010's Pink Panther and Pals.

The cat isn't done, either. In November 2020, news broke that Jeff Fowler — director of Sonic the Hedgehog – had signed on to direct a Pink Panther film with the cat as the hero. Unconfirmed reports indicate the cat will be a detective's imaginary friend. 

In 1993, Blake Edwards made one final stab at reviving the Pink Panther series. Edwards cast Italian actor Roberto Benigni as Jacques Gambrelli. Born out of wedlock, Gambrelli is the son of Jacques Clouseau and Maria Gambrelli (Claudia Cardinale) — the murder suspect from A Shot in the Dark. A police officer in the south of France, Gambrelli has yet to earn the equal of his father's reputation, but he's nevertheless pulled into an investigation when he comes across the kidnappers of Princess Yasmin (Debrah Farentino) of the fictional nation of Lugash.

Unfortunately, no one liked Son of Pink Panther anymore than they did its 1983 predecessor, Curse of the Pink Panther. In fact, judging by their different aggregate critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes – Curse's abysmal 29% to Son's hopeless 6%– they were even less impressed, which is arguably a feat unto itself. Just as Roger Ebert did for Alan Arkin's turn at the franchise 25 years earlier in Inspector Clouseau, a number of critics praised Benigni but posited he had little to work with in Son. "I can foresee a future for Benigni in American comedy," Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote for Chicago Reader, "but probably not as Clouseau Junior." Rosenbaum went on to write of Son and the franchise as a whole, "The dead horse [Blake] Edwards has been beating for over a decade finally seems to be turning into a rather sticky glue."

Edwards got the message. Son is the last film in his series, but Clouseau would live again.

Whether you call it life imitating art or just popular culture changing how we see real life, the Pink Panther franchise helped to name some of the world's most notorious thieves. 

The crimes of an alleged international network of jewel thieves became much more well-known when the acclaimed documentarian Havana Marking researched the subject for her 2013 film Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers. Smash & Grab tells the story of this network named after the film franchise with interview footage of professionals pursuing the group, as well as some people claiming to be members, closed-circuit recordings of actual heists, and fictionalized accounts of other thefts.

One of the most stunning pieces of footage in Smash & Grab gives a good example of how efficient its subjects are. Security footage shows some of the alleged Pink Panthers driving two Audis through the doors of a mall in Dubai and stealing $4 million worth of jewelry in under 2 minutes.