Actor: Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers played three parts in Dr. Strangelove and was originally cast in a fourth, and the range across them, a mild president, a British officer and a Nazi scientist, is astonishing in a single film.

He came from The Goon Show on radio, where the voice work was the entire instrument, and Being There gave him his best and last major performance as a gardener mistaken for a sage.

He said repeatedly in interviews that he had no personality of his own outside the characters, which was probably partly performance and probably partly true.

The Pink Panther films made him internationally famous and he grew to resent Clouseau considerably.