REVIEWED - THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS: Opening on a dazzling credit sequence by Irish animator Paul Donnellon, this wholly unflattering biopic charts the rise of Peter Sellers from his days as a radio star and his early British comedy movies, on to international success as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies, and to his penultimate, career-best performance in Being There shortly before his death at the age of 54 in 1980.

That poignant and still performance marked the apotheosis in the actor's career, when the clown not only got to play Hamlet, but rose admirably to the challenge. The Life and Death of Peter Sellers gives its subject due acknowledgement for his outstanding achievements in a wildly uneven career that produced some of the funniest and some of the most gratingly self-indulgent performances in cinema history.

The film is, inevitably, more concerned with the man behind the masks. It never flinches from depicting Sellers as anything other than a cold, horrible, selfish and deeply insecure individual given to uncontrollable destructive rages driven by jealousy, ego and sheer petulance. Sellers is depicted as a man more at home in the skin of the characters he played with such gusto than in his own essentially miserable, self-pitying life.

He is shown to be mindlessly cruel towards his first wife, Anne (Emily Watson) and their two children; fixated by his pushy mother (Miriam Margolyes), a true Mrs Worthington; and meeting his match in his second, much younger wife, actress Britt Ekland, zestily played by Charlize Theron.

Significantly, on their first date, Sellers takes Ekland to the cinema - to sit with him watching himself dominate the screen in Dr Strangelove, a showcase for his own versatility in different roles.

Director Stephen Hopkins allows his film to wallow in hyperactive excess at times, but it exerts a consistent fascination in its adept recreation of key Sellers scenes from his best-known movies and in his running battle of egos with Pink Panther series director Blake Edwards, who's played with wicked aplomb (in a series of safari suits) by John Lithgow.

Only Stanley Tucci's uncertain portrayal of Stanley Kubrick jars in a fine cast headed by Geoffrey Rush. Rush succeeds not just in capturing a remarkable physical impersonation of Sellers and, along the way, his most famous screen personae, but also in fully inhabiting his eerily complex personality. It is a show-stopping portrayal that Sellers himself surely would have appreciated.