This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Though Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen were hot on Steve Coogan’s heels during those early years of the new century, top dog status amongst his peers and critics remained largely assured. With three triumphant television series featuring Middle England alter ego Alan Partridge in the bag, this dedicated student of comedy history was hankering for the next game-changing move.
The 1970s northern lad who had religiously recorded Monty Python television repeats knew all too well his heroes never stood still. And to further raise the stakes, the biggest hero of all was suddenly looming large.
“Who better than Coogan?” was a familiar refrain amongst London comedy cliques when it emerged in 2003 that a screen adaptation of Roger Lewis’s still definitive biography, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, was in the works.
Rarely cursed by self-doubt, Coogan certainly concurred, whilst the film’s executives came close — only blinking at the eleventh hour and playing it safe with the more internationally known Australian, Geoffrey Rush. “I really wanted that part badly,” Coogan flatly announced shortly afterwards. “Then Geoffrey Rush came along and said, ‘I want to do it,’ and he’s got an Academy Award and I haven’t, and I was out of the picture. I don’t mind admitting I was pissed off about that.”
The film that followed offered some consolation; a pedestrian story on screen never coming close to the ghoul of Sellers so compellingly drawn out on Lewis’s pages. Whilst chameleon Sellers’ oft-repeated assertion that he possessed “no interesting personality” of his own sounded increasingly affected as years passed, Rush was given little chance to dispel the notion. Flimsy awards ceremony success at the time (Golden Globe for best TV film actor, no less) should not persuade us otherwise.
In taking on a West End production of Dr. Strangelove, Coogan set a high bar for himself
Yet Coogan could not let it rest: during his other television masterpiece, The Trip, he was still banging on about being “down to the last two” for Sellers seven years on. Co-star and professional sparring partner Rob Brydon reassured him: “As I’ve told you many times before, you’d have been better than Geoffrey Rush.” Though fashionably playing an “exaggerated” version of himself in the series, the difference between the two Coogans at that moment was paper-thin.
Two decades on from being denied the chance to inhabit the bones of his idol, Coogan’s status as the nation’s comedy colossus seemed assured. Approaching 60, he had lived four years longer than Sellers (who died after a heart attack in 1980). Rather than portray the man, why not reinterpret some of his best characters?
In taking on the starring roles in a West End production of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical magnum opus Dr. Strangelove, Coogan set a high bar for himself, not least logistically since it required him in four separate parts on stage (even Sellers only played three). But such audacity has not quite paid off. Sellers is having the last laugh.
Whilst critical reaction has been broadly supportive of Coogan’s portrayals, the production as a whole, directed and co-written by Sean Foley along with Coogan’s old collaborator Armando Iannucci, is rightly deemed a misfire — occupying an unwanted no man’s land of so-so imitation of the original to hackneyed nods to the present.
As for Coogan himself? The man’s long been incapable of delivering anything approaching below par, but the nagging question remains: why? It could be argued he’s hindered by a play that never really hits the mark, but Coogan’s performance can only be regarded as serviceable by his own impeccable standards.
Whilst portrayals of Group Captain Mandrake and President Muffley (Sellers’ best roles in the film) tick along perfectly pleasingly, it’s testament to Coogan’s stagecraft that his Dr Strangelove counts as the standout achievement. Funny-voiced German Nazis aren’t all the rage they once were, but he somehow succeeds in giving his camp psychopath a fresh new lease of life.
But again, why? Why, at the height of powers, would Coogan wish to give such blood, sweat and tears to this essentially derivative venture — one in which he was always likely to come off second best? In what also happens to be the centenary year of the late Goon’s birth, modern-day Coogan, for all the plaudits enjoyed in the present, unwisely insists on an attempted land grab from Sellers’ past.
Reflecting on his star’s improvised/masterfully edited performance as Strangelove during the film’s final moments — the previously wheelchair-bound scientist screeching, “Mein Führer! I can walk!” — Kubrick, amongst that small club of directors capable of controlling the Sellers wildfire, romantically maintained his actor had touched a “state of comic ecstasy”.
Little chance of that 60 years on. Coogan’s performance proves more controlled, more knowing throughout, as suits the age. Audiences are rarely left in doubt that, as with Alan Partridge, he and the writers are two steps ahead. In this respect he and Sellers have always been very different beasts; it’s amongst the reasons why the play is such an awkward fit.
Such generational comparisons are also inevitably problematic. Much of Sellers’ résumé struggles in the current age: whether it be Clouseau’s endless pratfalls and English-speaking “French”, or those impenetrable Goons and Indian/Chinaman accents, Father Time isn’t merciful. Though some of the landmark performances (Fred Kite, Strangelove, some Clouseau, Chauncey Gardiner) continue to cock a snook at the unforgiving present, credible judgement of long-dead Sellers should not be overly hindered by 2025’s passing tastes. Partridge will hardly be packing the same punch 60 years from now. Yet when it comes to Coogan versus Sellers, it’s Coogan picking the fight.
There are personal and professional parallels impossible to ignore. After carving out early careers as light entertainment impressionists, both soon enough fixed upon bigger prizes. Young Sellers may have courteously talked of Alec Guinness as an “idol”, but never without considering himself the latter’s rightful comic successor. Coogan’s conviction regarding his own seat at the top table was similarly unwavering from the beginning.
The significance of national minority origins cannot be downplayed, however unalike. The third child of six in a bustling Irish Catholic family in Middleton, Greater Manchester, the boy Stephen learnt to navigate the pecking order early on; proud Irish/Mancunian roots providing ample emotional rocket fuel for the journey ahead. Only child Sellers was, by contrast, monstrously spoilt by Jewish mother Peg. Whilst Coogan is armed with the certainty of regional identity, the much-travelled Sellers, often on the road with theatrical parents, couldn’t even make up his mind where he was born. Having officially arrived in the Hampshire seaside resort Southsea, he could alternatively be heard insisting his birthplace was father Bill’s Yorkshire. Never shy to make it up as he went along, this Portuguese Jewish/Yorkshireman/Londoner could be forgiven for the identity crisis. His rootlessness also proved the godsend for those many masks that followed.
For most, Sellers will always primarily be Clouseau as much as Coogan is always primarily Partridge. Both naturally deemed their most commercially successful creations albatrosses at various stages: Coogan only more comfortable returning to Alan once assured a degree of critical success was accomplished elsewhere on film, not least 2013’s Philomena alongside Judi Dench.
Having rejected offers to reprise Clouseau for a third time in 1968, later career doldrums suffered by Sellers and Pink Panther director Blake Edwards eventually led to the Inspector’s return seven years later, swiftly followed by two further sequels.
More importantly for Sellers, commercial clout courtesy of Clouseau ensured fulfilment of a near decade-long obsession with bringing Jerzy Kosiński’s 1971 novel Being There to the screen. His portrayal of man-child gardener Chance, who improbably finds himself propelled to accidental status of political sage in Washington DC, remains moving and prescient — only more so when knowing Sellers is himself on borrowed time. Should we sensibly ignore the relentlessly crap The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu that followed just before his demise, Being There proves the fitting swan song.
And this is the issue when attempting to critically assess these two comic geniuses from a basis of artistic parity: bluntly speaking, Sellers made it in Hollywood — Coogan, well, just hasn’t. The transition proved more straightforward for Sellers from the start: the first great cinematic role as union man Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack overlapping with his final days as a radio Goon.
Hollywood worship soon enough ensued: his reign across the pond only kiboshed in 1964 by a series of near-fatal heart attacks brought about by constant pill-popping and bonking Britt Ekland. After all those incoherent rants about American “berks” thwarting his talent in the chaotic years that followed, a once again bankable Sellers was welcomed back to the fold a decade on.
Coogan’s Tinseltown forays have been solid without ever threatening the defining career upgrade many presumed inevitable
Having struck at the nerve endings of baby boomer/middle-class English life with unrivalled brilliance for over 30 years, Coogan’s Partridge occupies territory in the national psyche perhaps not seen since Tony Hancock’s frayed post-war delusions earned similar reverence and affection all those decades before. Yet, apart from when enjoying the appreciative company of east-coast, west-coast comedy in-crowds, Alan’s American vacation would prove mainly dispiriting. Away from Partridge, Coogan’s Tinseltown forays have down the years been solid enough without ever producing the defining career upgrade many presumed would come his way.
Wrong place, wrong time? Whilst Sellers thrived in an era when leading British comic actors could look forward to clinking glasses in producers’ offices in Beverly Hills, the Golden State these days offers slimmer pickings. Though Hugh Grant cashed in on being pretty before later cannily opting to be typecast as middle-aged villains, Hollywood doesn’t do funny Englishmen like it used to. Dudley Moore would have little chance in 2025.
When attempting to judge a performer of his long-standing calibre, it would be folly to dismiss the possibility of Coogan still eventually earning that desired place in the Hollywood sun. The form book however indicates this to be one part of the remarkable story where he’s likely to fall short.
As recent events prove, Hollywood Sellers remains the cause of a rare chink in the Coogan armour. For Coogan, the phantom of Sellers forever lingers; the one who, for a time, had it all. The one that got away.
