'A slur on Sellers'

Such is the secrecy surrounding the film that even Geoffrey Rush - the leading man - has only very recently seen a final cut. But according to the film-industry grapevine, the movie will viciously expose the weaknesses and vanities of a man who was adored in public but consumed, as many great comics are, by his own private demons.

Hollywood gossip about what the film actually contains even led to Ekland, Sellers's third wife, threatening legal action to try to stop the film's distribution in Britain. She married Sellers in 1964, only to divorce him four years later, citing emotional cruelty.

Her fury appears to come less from an attempt to defend Sellers's posthumous reputation and more from the fact that she is unhappy about how her part in the collapse of the marriage is portrayed on screen. Ekland famously married Sellers 11 days after meeting him at the Dorchester Hotel, and had to return her wedding ring to the royal jeweller Garrard's because Sellers stamped on it so often during their frequent marital rows.

She is also said to be unhappy with the storyline, which is said to feature Sellers pursuing Sophia Loren while still married to Ekland. Her agent says dismissively: "Britt is not discussing the film with anyone. She has no plans to see it and won't talk about it."

In his only public comment, Sellers's son, Michael, has described the film as "rubbish". Michael always had a difficult relationship with his father, whom he has written about in a moving and soul-searching autobiography of his own. I had lunch with Michael as he was writing his familial mea culpa at his small flat in Swiss Cottage after his father died.

HE WAS, and is, a somewhat tortured man whose frequent comment about his famous father was simply: "I loved Dad, but it was always difficult to know how much Dad loved in return." Michael, who now works as a builder, refused to co-operate with the film's producers, and remains embittered that the film has been made at all.

He is not alone. In fact, even without the current furore surrounding its imminent release, this cinematic interpretation of Sellers's life has courted controversy. The Evening Standard understands that the original plan from the producers who first backed the project had been to cast American comic actor Robin Williams in the lead role.

Although the current script is written by the relatively unknown screenwriter Christopher Markus, the option to make a film of Sellers's life has been in the pipeline for some time. "A script about Sellers has been knocking around Hollywood for years," an industry source told me this week. "Finally, someone has decided to do something about it."

One idea proposed in Hollywood some years ago would have seen Williams recreating the life of his hero. But according to the industry source, Williams was unhappy about the negative storylines and one-sided character assassination which ran through an original script he was shown. "He was interested, but not when he saw what was going on," the source added.

Eventually, the central London producers, Company Pictures, picked it up and with the multi-million-dollar backing from US TV channel HBO managed to line up Rush and Theron in the lead roles.

Walk-on parts include Emilia Fox as Sellers's fourth wife, Lynne Frederick, who died of drink and alcohol abuse in 1996 at the age of 39, and Edward Tudor-Pole who plays the late Spike Milligan, another great friend of Sellers, who starred in The Goon Show with him.

Even the inclusion of Milligan, however, has been controversial: much to the irritation of Sellers's defenders, Milligan's daughter Jane has a small part in the film in the role of a newspaper reporter.

Whatever the depiction of him in the film, it nonetheless prompts the almost unanswerable question: who was the real Peter Sellers?

Graham Stark, who has just published his own autobiography, thinks he knows. "Sentimental, funny, nostalgic, and just 'my mate Pete'," he says. "I suppose, towards the end of his life, Pete did change. It was his illness, his frequent heart attacks, which constantly played on his mind. Every day he lived his life thinking that any minute that might be it.

"Living like that would change anyone. I remember one time he drove myself and my wife around north London in his new Bentley, showing us all the houses he once lived in. When we got to Highgate, where he had lived as a child, he just put his head on the steering wheel and cried and cried. ' Whatever happened to Peter Sellers?' he asked us, weeping.

"People say that Peter was a selfish man, that he stitched people up in the business to get parts and so on. But that is simply not true. Countless times he put me forward for parts to directors who had never heard of me, but Peter convinced them I would be good. He didn't do it out of charity - he had to respect your work - but he always supported his friends.

"He was a complex man, he could sometimes live in the past and be difficult, but he was no monster."