Texan accent. Kubrick requested screenwriter Terry Southern to record in his natural accent a tape of Kong's lines. After practising with Southern's recording, Sellers got sufficient control of the accent, and started shooting the scenes in the aeroplane. After the first day's shooting, Sellers sprained his ankle while leaving a restaurant and could no longer work in the cramped cockpit set. Kubrick then re-cast Slim Pickens as Kong. The three roles Sellers undertook were distinct, "variegated, complex and refined", and critic Alexander Walker considered that these roles "showed his genius at full stretch". Sellers played Muffley as a bland, placid intellectual in the mould of Adlai Stevenson; he played Mandrake as an unflappable Englishman; and Dr. Strangelove, a character influenced by pre-war German cinema, as a wheelchair-using fanatic. The critic for The Times wrote that the film includes, "three remarkable performances from Mr. Peter Sellers, masterly as the President, diverting as a revue-sketch ex-Nazi US Scientist ... and acceptable as an RAF officer," although the critic from The Guardian thought his portrayal of the RAF officer alone was, "worth the price of an admission ticket". For his performance in all three roles, Sellers was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor at the 37th Academy Awards, and the Best British Actor award at the 18th British Academy Film Awards. Between November 1963 and February 1964, Sellers began filming A Shot in the Dark, an adaptation of a French play, L'Idiote by Marcel Achard. Sellers found the part and the director, Anatole Litvak, uninspiring; the producers brought in Blake Edwards to replace Litvak. Together with writer William Peter Blatty, they turned the script into a Clouseau comedy, also adding Herbert Lom as Commissioner Dreyfus and Burt Kwouk as Cato. During filming, Sellers's relationship with Edwards became strained; the two would often stop speaking to each other during filming, communicating only by the passing of notes. Sellers's personality was described by others as difficult and demanding, and he often clashed with fellow actors and directors. Upon its release in late June 1964, Bosley Crowther noted the "joyously free and facile way" in which Sellers had developed his comedy technique. Towards the end of filming, in early February 1964, Sellers met Britt Ekland, a Swedish actress who had arrived in London to film Guns at Batasi. On 19 February 1964, just ten days after their first meeting, the couple married. Sellers soon