Revenge of the Pink Panther as an informant to lure Clouseau into a trap, but the Chief Inspector's car and clothes are stolen by transvestite criminal Claude Russo (Sue Lloyd), who is unknowingly killed by Douvier's men instead. Subsequently, Douvier and the French public believe Clouseau is dead; as a result of this assumption, Clouseau's ex-boss, former Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), is restored to sanity and is released from the lunatic asylum to perform the investigation (despite being seemingly disintegrated in the previous film). In Russo's clothes and insisting on his true identity, Clouseau is taken to the asylum himself but escapes into
Trail of the Pink Panther in the fashion of Jack Lemmon's Professor Fate). When Sellers died, United Artists tried to get Dudley Moore to play Clouseau in the Sellers-penned "Romance of the Pink Panther". Moore wouldn't do it without Edwards and was only willing to play Clouseau once as a tribute to Sellers (knowing "Romance" was to have ended the series, according from a LA Times interview with Moore in 1980). United Artists wanted the series to continue, but Edwards wouldn't use another actor as Clouseau, no doubt remembering the negative reception that "Inspector Clouseau" suffered upon release in 1968 (a production which featured Alan