When Peter Sellers faked a heart attack to get out of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’: “As a person, he was insane”
Peter Sellers may have been the greatest comedic genius to ever come out of the UK and made it big in Hollywood – but he was also a troubled soul who suffered from depression and alcohol problems, especially in his later years. All these issues seemingly came to a head on the ill-fated Ghost in the Noonday Sun shoot in 1973. This production was such an unmitigated debacle that it forever tainted the relationship between Sellers and director Peter Medak, despite them being close friends before the shoot. In fact, Medak claimed Sellers was borderline insane while making the movie – and that he may have faked a heart attack to get a couple of days off.
In hindsight, perhaps Medak should have thought better about signing up for Ghost in the Noonday Sun, based on a 1965 pirate novel. You see, Sellers persuaded him to make the film, yet when he first arrived at the Dr Strangelove star’s London home to work on the script, he was kept waiting so long that he eventually went looking for him. He told The Guardian that he found Sellers in his bedroom “standing on his head, naked, in a yoga position.”
Fast-forward to Sellers arriving at the shooting location in Kyrenia, Cyprus, and Medak immediately knew something wasn’t right. Sellers was acting oddly, but it was put down to him being sad after his recent breakup with Liza Minnelli. To Medak’s horror, though, Sellers almost immediately seemed to lose faith in the film, and when writer Spike Milligan arrived in Cyprus, he arranged a meeting between the three of them. It was decided that the film was “on a disaster course,” so Milligan rewrote the script to Sellers’ specifications. Then, Sellers didn’t turn up on the first day of shooting the new material.
Sellers claimed he was ill on that first day, which might have been true – but his next move beggared all belief. He claimed that he wouldn’t be able to resume making the film until his secretary trekked to his home in Gstaad, Switzerland, to do something of vital importance. To Medak’s utter bemusement, Sellers wanted her to turn around a vase, which he was sure was facing the wrong way.
By this point, Medak knew he couldn’t trust Sellers in his current state, so he began shooting the film around his supposed leading man. He wanted Milligan, a comedy giant in his own right, to shoot his scenes during the day while also rewriting at night. When Sellers got wind of this, though, he reportedly tried to get the movie shut down. He wasn’t successful, so he simply resolved to amplify his behaviour tenfold to make things as untenable for Medak as possible.
“Peter is indisposed,” Medak wrote in his production diary. “Peter is three hours late. Peter refused to work.” This continued for several days, and Sellers also feigned illness a few more times. However, his piece de resistance came when he appeared to suffer a heart attack in the middle of shooting and was quickly rushed to hospital.
Medak couldn’t exactly accuse his lead actor of doing something as unconscionable as faking a cardiac arrest, but he couldn’t help feeling suspicious, either. Then, a few days later, his suspicions were confirmed when he spotted something in the newspaper that made his heart sink: photographs of Sellers eating in a fancy restaurant with Princess Margaret.
Ultimately, Medak was somehow able to finish Ghost in the Noonday Sun, but what he, Sellers, and Milligan managed to create under the extreme stress of the shoot was by no means good. In fact, Columbia Pictures felt it was so bad that it shouldn’t be released, so the studio buried the film for over a decade. It finally saw release in 1985 on VHS.
In 2004, Medak told Variety, “As an artist, he was a genius. As a person, he was insane.” The disappointed director, who turned the soul-crushing experience into a tell-all documentary titled The Ghost of Peter Sellers, added, “He destroyed the whole film.”
