In between the release of The Pink Panther and its 1964 sequel, A Shot in the Dark, Peter Sellers suffered the first of many heart attacks that he would end up having prior to his death in 1980. Sellers had just returned from Disney’s Magic Kingdom with his wife, Britt Ekland, and his two children when he collapsed in bed after opening a bottle of champagne. He immediately suspected he was having a heart attack and asked Ekland to call for a doctor. By the next day, newspapers were reporting that his suspicions were correct.
A couple of months later, Sellers revealed that things were much worse than the papers had initially reported. “I had eight cardiac arrests,” he explained in a June 1964 interview. “I, of course, didn’t know it at the time, but they had just about given up on me. By all appearances, I was a goner.”
Sellers was heavily sedated once he was in the hospital, but remembered waking up now and again and seeing doctors standing over him. He later realized that he was gaining consciousness periodically because of the electric pacemaker they were using to shock him back to life. Apparently, there were only two such machines in the world in those days, and if he’d been anywhere else, he wouldn’t have lived to tell the story:
What Sellers didn’t mention in any interviews, however, was what led to him having those eight heart attacks. As Ekland tells it in Ed Sikov’s Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, her ex-husband “was always searching for what he liked to term as the ‘ultimate’ orgasm, and when he discovered that amyl nitrate assisted his physical endurance, the tiny capsules of chemical became almost a routine component of our nightly love-making pattern.” According to Ekland, Sellers had just taken some before having sex with her the night he collapsed in their bed.
Heart issues would ultimately plague Sellers for the rest of his life. In 1977, he suffered an additional heart attack and was fitted with a pacemaker. When asked about his attacks at a press conference the following year, he jokingly responded, “I plan to give them up. I’m down to two a day.”
Sellers passed away on July 24, 1980, after suffering yet another massive heart attack. He was 54 years old.
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