My dad’s home movies made Peter Sellers cry

WHEN Donna Berenger moved to Henley in 1975, she became a key part of the town’s operatic society as an actress, singer and director.

Mrs Berenger, of Church Avenue, has seen audiences both creased in laughter and lifted from their seats in shock but she recalls a moment on New Year’s Eve in 1954 when actor Peter Sellers was moved to tears in her living room. Her family tree is deeply entrenched in performing arts as her father David Dale toured the country as a singer and dancer and her mother Donalda appeared in one of Australia’s first talking films.

Mr Dale was starring with Sellers in Mother Goose at the London Palladium in 1954. He invited the Goons star back to his house for a party to celebrate the New Year and displayed some of his home videos.

As the film reel exhibited images from as early as the Twenties, one face stood out immediately to Sellers and tears crept down his face. It was his father Bill, who had been friends with Mr Dale after touring together, standing alongside friends smoking a cigarette with a smile.

Sellers had a large collection of home movies but none of them contained any footage of his father, who had died several years earlier, and this was the first time he had since seen an image of him.

Mrs Berenger, who directed Dennis Potter’s play Blue Remembered Hills for a Henley Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society production in 1998, said: “There’s a great deal of Peter Sellers’ father in the footage because he was my father’s accompanist.

“Peter had been in the pantomine with my father on New Year’s Eve and he was invited back to our house for a party.

“My father got out all his films but he didn’t realise there was a connection. When Bill came on screen, my father told the audience he was a pianist and Peter literally cried.

“His father was deceased by that point and he had never seen him on film. It never clicked for my dad when he was with Peter for weeks. Peter couldn’t get over this, it really was emotional for him.”

Mrs Berenger, who met Sellers backstage, revealed how he got cold feet because he wasn’t used to projecting his voice and quit the production before the end of its run. Mr Dale, who had appeared opposite Julie Andrews in her début stage performance in Cinderella at the same venue the previous year, had been his understudy as well as playing another role, and he stepped in.

Mrs Berenger, a grandmother of six, said: “Like a lot of comics, he was the life and soul of any party but at home he was very serious. He was a bit jumpy and didn’t share a dressing room with anyone.”

In 1995, she provided the footage to the BBC for their Arena documentary on Sellers, a three-part programme that took 15 years to produce, just three days before it was due to be broadcast. It was mainly based on Sellers’ home-made film collection, which was discovered after his death in 1980, and they had been desperate to source some material depicting his father.

Mrs Berenger, a former hairdresser at Rudi Kartal, Hair By James and Churchills, said: “I recognised in the Radio Times a picture of Bill Sellers with his wife and a baby on his lap, which was Peter. I knew he had been in my father’s film.

“I called the BBC and told them I had some amazing footage of his father. They said, ‘you don’t know how important this is’ and they sent a car round to Henley. I couldn’t believe how significant this was.

“I’m so proud I did that because my father has made a contribution to something quite important.

“When Peter Sellers’ family saw the first programme they phoned the BBC and asked where they had got that film. They said the only regret he ever had was that he had never got his father on film.

“They asked permission to have a copy of it and I was only too happy to give them it. I said I didn’t want my name credited but my father’s instead because it was his film.”

Mrs Berenger, who is the cousin of Titanic actor David Warner, screened the footage, which was shot between the Twenties and Fifties, at Chantry House next to St Mary’s Church on January 10 this year. About 40 people, including trustees of the Henley Municipal Charities, residents of the Almshouses in Church Avenue and Western Avenue and Mrs Berenger’s family, gathered to watch the film. It lasted for one hour and five minutes and Mrs Berenger provided commentary to the silent film. It included footage of the Queen Mother’s coronation, a three-month family trip from Southampton to Sydney via the United States, stage productions and play acting.

A buffet was also served and a raffle was held, which raised more than £100 for the Children’s Society.

Mrs Berenger, who raised her three children in Hart Street, said: “One of the trustees saw a bit of the film and thought it had to be screened so they encouraged me to share it. I never dreamt in a thousand years I would have a public showing. It was a very emotional day for me.

“I invited trustees as guests for once because they usually do things for us, like take us for Christmas dinner. The audience didn’t know what they were going to see. I’m just so pleased everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy it. It still makes me laugh. I never tire of seeing it.”