Memorabilia under the hammer

Peter Sellers’s Golden Globe award and the last document he ever signed are to be auctioned off next week.

The sale of memorabilia, taking place almost exactly 30 years after he died, is expected to raise £9,000, around £6,000 of which is expected to come from the only Golden Globe he ever won – for best actor in a comedy or musical for his 1979 film Being There.

The last document he signed on the day of his fatal heart attack, July 22, 1980, is also up for sale at the auction in Devizes, Wiltshire, next Saturday, where it is expected to fetch £2,000.

It is a change to his will that would have given his daughter Victoria £20,000 rather than the £800 she actually received. It is thought that Sellers was disinheriting his fourth wife Lynne Frederick at the time, but never completed the process so she received his £4.5 million.

Victoria, who was 15 when her father died, has had a troubled life, including several drug-related court sentences, while her attempts at launching careers as an actress and stand-up amounted to little more than a Playboy spread and the video Sex Tips with Heidi Fleiss and Victoria Sellers.

Andrew Aldridge, of auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son, suggested that had she inherited the ‘considerable’ greater sum, Victoria’s life might have been different.

After Sellers collapsed in his room at London’s Dorchester hotel room, he fell into a coma, dying two days later in hospital, aged 54.

Published: 9 Jul 2010