PETER SELLERS FOR TWA!

The great Peter Sellers picked up a little bread and butter cash doing a series of ads for TWA in the mid-seventies and the first of the above posted ads, where he plays an Italian 'Via Veneto or Bust' swinger, was one of my favorite ads of my childhood. This was around the time of the re-emeregence of the 'Pink Panther' as a movie series beginning with 1975s 'Return Of The Pink Panther'--hard to understand why the series had lay dormant for a decade. Also at this time Sellers, who'd been in increasingly strange Euro items over the previous few years and had developed a rep for seriously bizarre behavior, started appearing more frequently on talk shows and in public. Perhaps he surfaced from a depression of some sort. Or perhaps a good manager had his ear and convinced him to make himself a little more accessible, more user-friendly. I don't know. But this was the Sellers that delighted me as a kid, though he was apparently just as mystifyingly strange and mercurial in private (and to work with apparently) as he'd always been. From here it was a short four years to 'Being There'. And from there a quick trip to his early demise...

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