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
The Pink Panther "Return.") The plot of the first film is based on the theft of this diamond. The diamond reappears in several later films in the series, "The Return of the Pink Panther," "Trail of the Pink Panther," and "Curse of the Pink Panther." It also appears in the revival of the Inspector Clouseau character in the much later Steve Martin films "The Pink Panther" (2006), and its sequel "The Pink Panther 2" (2009). The name "the Pink Panther" became attached to Inspector Clouseau in much the same way that "Frankenstein" has been used in film titles to refer to Dr. Frankenstein's