‘He was someone who was supremely talented but had possibly the worst taste in history’
did three weeks later. Ekland says the British public were enthralled by the “fairytale story of their favourite actor and this little cream puff from Sweden”.
The reality was somewhat darker. “He decided what I was going to wear,” she says. “I had no say in it. He just pre-decided everything without even asking me.”
After Sellers went to California, he summoned his new wife to join him even though she was three weeks into a shoot for a new military film, Guns At Batasi.
Ekland got on a plane with no clothes and only a passport. Although her intention was to stay only a weekend, Sellers’ plan was sabotage. Speaking in the documentary, she says: “When I arrived he said, ‘I have a doctor here looking after you because you don’t look well.’
“The doctor said, ‘She’s suffering strain and stress. You can’t possibly go back, you’re not well enough’.” So was that true? “Of course not,” she snorts. “I was 21, fit as a fiddle, but I had no choice. I couldn’t have said, ‘I’m sorry, I love you, but I’ve got to go back to work now.’
“There was no option for that. I was fired from the film and replaced by Mia Farrow.
So that was my career over.” Ekland, now 77, refers to her diary entries during their marriage.The Swedish word for “fight” crops up repeatedly.
On another night, she records that Sellers smashed a radio in frustration after an argument in Rome.
She says she now believes Sellers had bipolar disorder, a condition people did not know about or fully understand then.
“He was a very tormented soul who should have had more help,” she says. “But instead he was enabled, because he was such a valuable asset.”
Sellers’ mental woes affected all of his relationships, notes the programme’s producer John O’Rourke.
“Because he was this total success, these outbursts and extreme behaviour were tolerated,” he says. He made bad choices, however. There was Casino Royale, panned in 1967, and his final dismal film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu.
The only exception towards the end was the 1979 Oscar-winning drama Being There, in which he plays a simple-minded gardener mistaken for an upper-class gentleman after his employer’s death.
“Sellers made some absolutely diabolically bad films which are unwatchable nowadays,” O’Rourke says. “They are atrocious with one exception and that is him.
“He was someone who was supremely talented but had possibly the worst taste in history.”
SELLERS’ relationship with his three children – Michael and Sarah Sellers by his first marriage, and Victoria Sellers with Ekland – deteriorated after his fourth and final marriage to actress Lynne Frederick.
Sellers wrote letters to his children saying: “I no longer wish to be thought of as your father.”
Then he decided to divorce Lynne and drew up a will excluding her. Six months later he changed his mind again and withdrew that will with a handwritten note. When he died, his entire $10million estate went to her.
It was a rollercoaster ride to the last. “But he wouldn’t have had the career he would have done if he hadn’t had the relationships he had,” Will adds. “The two things intertwined, his relationships helped in his roles and dictated which films he would do.”
And the documentary has been cathartic for Will. “I know he wasn’t the easiest person to live with and he wasn’t there for family all the time but it was still nice to hear the stories people have told.
“As much as there were bad times, there were good times. It’s given me a more well-rounded image of him but it’s made me feel like I know him a bit better which is what I wanted to do.”
●●Peter Sellers: A State Of Comic Ecstasy, a BBC Arts commission for BBC Two, airs tonight at 9pm