9. Peter Sellers - Kiss Me, Stupid
By 1964, Peter Sellers was a fast rising comedy star, having starred twice for Stanley Kubrick (in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, where his talents for voice mimickry were put to brilliant use) and having made a massive splash in the first two of Blake Edwards' (eventually tiresome) Pink Panther series, The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. Billy Wilder, the legendary director of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, was eager to work with the British comedian; he hired Sellers to star in his latest film, Kiss Me Stupid, and was also hoping Sellers would appear as Dr. Watson in Wilder's long gestating project The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. The results were good -- according to biographer Ed Sikov, even the usually taciturn Wilder was finding it impossible not to crack up watching Sellers embody Orville Spooner, the remarkably untalented and insanely jealous composer living in Climax, Nevada -- but the relationship was testy: Sellers disliked the free form party atmosphere of Wilder's sets, with guests and celebrities coming to and fro, and Wilder's rigid adherence to script (actors weren't allowed to change
one syllable) did not jive well
at all with Sellers' improvisational sensibilities. Things seemed headed for some kind of confrontation...a confrontation avoided when Sellers up and skipped off to Disneyland for an unannounced vacation, and then proceeded to have a near fatal heart attack. Wilder decided not to wait for Sellers to recuperate, replacing him with character actor Ray Walston, then of TV's "My Favorite Martian". Sellers would go on to continue doing important, funny films -- Being There chief among them -- but he also became increasingly erratic and difficult for directors to control; and
Kiss Me Stupid ended up being the first real "failure" of Wilder's directorial career.