Inspector Clouseau

Inspector Jacques Clouseau
The Pink Panther and The Inspector character
Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau
First appearance	The Pink Panther
Portrayed by	Peter Sellers Alan Arkin Roger Moore Steve Martin
Information
Children	Jacques Gambrelli Jaqueline Gambrelli

Inspector Jacques Clouseau ([ʒak klu.zo]) is a fictional character in Blake Edwards' farcical The Pink Panther series. In most of the films he was played by Peter Sellers, but one film starred Alan Arkin and another featured an uncredited Roger Moore. In the 2006 Pink Panther revival and its 2009 sequel, he is played by Steve Martin.

Clouseau as The Inspector is also the main character in a series of short animated cartoons as part of The Pink Panther Show. More recent animated depictions from the 1970s onward were redesigned to more closely resemble Sellers, and later Martin.

Clouseau is an inept and incompetent police detective in the French Sûreté, whose investigations are marked by disorder. In The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), an attempt to interview witnesses leads to him falling down stairs, getting his hand caught in a medieval knight's gauntlet, then a vase; knocking a witness senseless, destroying a priceless piano, and accidentally shooting another officer. Nevertheless, Clouseau successfully solves his cases and finds the correct culprits, entirely by accident. He is promoted to Chief Inspector over the course of the series, and is regarded by background characters as France’s greatest detective, until they encounter him directly. His incompetence, combined with his luck and his periodically-correct interpretations of the situation, eventually transform his direct superior (former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus) into a homicidal psychotic. He appears convinced of his own intelligence, but does show some awareness of his limits, and attempts to appear elegant and refined regardless of what calamity he has just caused. Clouseau also insists upon elaborate costumes and aliases that range from the mundane (a worker for the phone company) to the preposterous (a bucktoothed hunchback with an oversized nose); but these are usually overcome by his characteristic mannerisms.