Stardates: Born June 26, 1904, in Rózsahegy, Hungary; died 1964.
Star Sign: Cancer
Star Qualities: Huge, expressive eyes; silken voice; equal panache in projecting humor or menace. Star Definition: "One of the finest and most subtle actors I ever worked with." – John Huston
Galaxy Of Characters: Doctor Gogol in Mad Love (1935), Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Dr. Herman Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Cornelius Leyden in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944).

In his biography of Fritz Lang, Patrick McGilligan offers a colorful, if unflattering, encapsulation of the Peter Lorre mystique, "Short, almost stunted, as pure and vaguely odious as a piglet. He had a moon-shaped face, sad eyes, and a low-pitched, silky purr of a voice. When the squeeze was put on, his eyes bugged out, his face transformed with fear and pleasure, the voice accelerated into a squeal. And then this deceptive Milquetoast of a man lashed out." Whether playing a sinister villain or a sniveling coward, Lorre was a magnet for the viewer's attention because he was such a peculiar creature -- a devious overgrown child who was so unlike any other actor -- that his behavior unpredictable, and his motives unfathomable.

Lorre was born Laszlo (Ladislav) Lowenstein on June 26, 1904, in the small Austro-Hungarian town of Rozsahegy (now Ruzomberok, Slovakia), in the remote region of the Carpathian Mountains that would later provide the settings for F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). Laszlo's father, Alajos (sometimes referred to as Alois), was an influential businessman, who encouraged his son to pursue a desk job. After the death of Laszlo's mother Elvira in 1908, the patriarch moved the family to Romania, then Vienna. There, Lorre became fascinated by the theatre and began neglecting his studies. Acquiring a taste for the Vienna night life, Laszlo quit his job as a bank clerk and began to pursue a stage career full time. The pursuit led him through several Eastern European cities, where he learned the craft in a variety of acting roles. Circa 1925, he returned to Vienna a new man. Not only had he gained a wealth of practical experience, he also had a new identity. Laszlo Lšwenstein had re-christened himself Peter Lorre.

By 1928 Lorre had made his way to Berlin, where he was cast in his first historically significant stage role, in Marieluise Fleisser's Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The play was staged by the avant-garde theatre group the VolksbŸhne, of which writer Bertold Brecht was a prominent member. Lorre went on to appear in Brecht and Kurt Weill's Happy End, Georg BŸchner's Danton's Death, and Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening. It was in Spring Awakening that Lorre gained the notice of filmmaker Fritz Lang, who was at the apex of his career, presiding over a series of lavish spectacles including Die Nibelungen (1924), Spies (1928) and Metropolis (1927). Lang was looking for someone to star in an ambitious crime drama he was co-writing with his wife, Thea von Harbou, tentatively titled Murderers Among Us. Lang offered Lorre the role but, according to McGilligan, refused to elaborate upon the "unforgivable crime" that lay at the heart of the film. Based on Lang's reputation, Lorre accepted.

Eventually it was revealed that the crime was the murder of children. The film was released as M (1931). Although it lacks the grandeur of some of Lang's epics, M is regarded by many as his supreme masterpiece, with considerable credit due Lorre, who is by turns sinister, pathetic and compelling. It was a star-making performance without parallel.

With his unconventional looks and strange appeal, Lorre landed roles as oddballs and misfits in a series of high-profile films produced at the UFA studios, including F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932).

In 1933, however, Lorre's career took a sudden detour. Like so many other artists of Jewish ancestry, Lorre fled Germany during the Nazis' rise to power. He traveled with actress Celia Lovsky, whom he had met in 1929. First they went to Vienna, then Paris, and then to London. Lorre's reputation preceded him so that, upon his arrival in London, he was offered the role of the heavy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. Even out-of-character, Lorre maintained an eclectic presence on the set. "They called him 'the walking overcoat,'" Alfred Hitchcock remembered, "because he went around in a long coat that came down to his feet." Lorre would reunite with Hitchcock two years later to play a curly-haired assassin in Secret Agent (1936).

While in London, Lorre and Lovsky were married, and the promising actress put aside her professional career. They divorced in 1945, and Lovsky revived her stage-and-screen ambitions. Adopting the Anglicized name Celia Lovsky, she appeared in more than a hundred films and television series before her death in 1979. It is believed that she was the one who first introduced Lorre to Fritz Lang and, perhaps to repay the debt, Lang gave Lovsky small parts in three of his American films in the 1950s.

After Lorre's rapid ascent to notoriety, Hollywood inevitably came calling. He landed the role of the diabolical Dr. Gogol in the MGM horror picture Mad Love (1935), a remake of the German silent thriller The Hands of Orlac (1924). A trailer for the film introduces him to American audiences as, "Peter Lorre, whom Charlie Chaplin calls 'The Greatest Living Actor.'" Lorre is then shown, reclined sideways in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, pretending to act natural, while co-star Frances Drake telephones to congratulate him on the role.

In America, Lorre found companionship with a number of filmmakers who had, for various reasons, left the German film industry. Mad Love was directed by former cinematographer Karl Freund (The Last Laugh [1924]), who had come to America in 1929 to help develop the Technicolor process.

For a time, Lorre roomed at the Chateau Marmont with writer/director Billy Wilder, a fellow Austrian who also came to America to flee Nazi persecution. Their friendship dissipated after a particularly awkward incident that occurred probably as Lorre was traveling to the UK to appear in Hitchcock's Secret Agent. Wilder told interviewer/filmmaker Cameron Crow in the 1999 book Conversations with Wilder, "In 1935, I was going to Europe and I found that Lorre and his wife were going on the same boat to Europe, before the war. So we took the same train [to New York]...we had dinner, amusing ourselves... His wife arrived at the table at half past nine and said Lorre was very sick. The medicine he took, the bottle had broken and he was scrambling around. I sent a telegram to a town in Arizona and I put the prescription in it so the doctor could bring it to the train. Meanwhile Lorre was absolutely insane... He was going nuts. The doctor met us at the train in Tucson, carrying to typical bag of a doctor. I said, 'Here, here, Doctor, come here.' The doctor said, 'I cannot fill this prescription. The prescription you sent me was pure morphine.' The train started again, it was a crazy scene. We sent another telegram to have an ambulance meet the train, and he left for a hospital in Albuquerque. Four days later, the boat was leaving from New York, and Peter Lorre and his wife are there. Now he's in a good mood; he's got a big bottle of that stuff... That's the story of how I found out he was a dope addict...We were friends, but never as close after that episode."

According to Stephen D. Youngkin's (2005) biography The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, as a young man, Lorre suffered a ruptured appendix and underwent surgery. When a second surgeon treated further complications in 1925, he prescribed morphine to soothe the discomfort (as well as Pantopon and Dilaudid). This was the beginning of Lorre's lifelong dependence on morphine.

After returning from the UK, Lorre scored the role of Japanese super-sleuth Kentaro Moto in a series of films for 20th Century-Fox. Lorre drove the franchise for eight films in rapid succession, beginning with Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937) and ending with Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (1939). Aside from the Mr. Moto films, Lorre was most often relegated to supporting roles, but his ability to craft memorable characters in brief spans of narrative made him an invaluable resource at the major studios. In the early 1940s, Lorre's unforgettable mug appeared in one classic film after another: John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), and Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

During the filming of the anti-Nazi gangster film All Through the Night (1941), Lorre met Kaaren Verne, another actress who had fled Germany for the United States (by way of the UK). Both were married to other people at the time -- Lorre to Lovsky and Verne to Arthur Young. Both divorces became final in the Spring of 1945, at which point Lorre and Verne immediately married. Born in Berlin in 1918, Verne appeared to be a rising star in Hollywood. But -- as Lovsky had before her -- Verne turned away from acting when she married Lorre in 1945. The marriage ended in 1950, and Verne also tried to revitalize her career. But, unlike Lovsky, Verne faced a more difficult struggle. Her career had lost its momentum, and she never achieved more than walk-on roles in a string of television series and films.

If overexposed, character actors tend to become clichés, a prisoner of the persona that made them so popular. The roles offered Lorre became increasingly two-dimensional, and the infrequent starring role was a pale shade of the kinds of films he had made in the early thirties (for example, compare Mad Love to 1946's shlocky man-tormented-by-a-severed-hand thriller The Beast with Five Fingers). The degree to which Lorre had become a caricature is illustrated by the Bugs Bunny cartoon Racketeer Rabbit (1946), which features a bulbous-eyed villain named Hugo (voiced by Mel Blanc). Flattering as the homage may have been, it showed that, in the eyes of Hollywood, Lorre was now firmly typecast.

In 1951, Lorre attempted to reinvent himself. He left Hollywood and returned to Germany, where he was given the opportunity to write and direct a film of his own, The Lost One (Der Verlorene). The trip to Germany also allowed him to seek treatment for his ongoing morphine addiction. It was at a sanitarium that he met the woman who would become his third wife: Anne Marie Brenning. They were married in 1953, divorced in 1962.

The Lost One was not successful upon its original release, but has since become a cult favorite. Lorre stars as Dr. Karl Rothe, a former Nazi scientist who is haunted by the crimes of his past. Upon its theatrical re-release in 1984, The New York Times's Vincent Canby wrote, "Though The Lost One isn't exactly a masterpiece, it's an interesting expression of the frustration of Lorre's creative personality, after he found himself in a comfortable kind of dead end in the Hollywood studio system."

Returning to the states, Lorre found a steady stream of acting opportunities, but few plum roles. Among his notable later performances are Julius O'Hara in John Huston's eclectic Beat the Devil (1953), but he generally offered little more than a spoof of his old menacing self, as in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Lorre began making guest appearances on television series and playing bit parts in second-rate Hollywood productions (including the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon vehicle Muscle Beach Party [1964]).

Muscle Beach Party was produced by American International Pictures (AIP), an independent company that specialized in low-budget drive-in fare. But AIP -- specifically producer/director Roger Corman -- appreciated the talents of neglected actors such as Lorre, and gave them homes at the ragtag studio. Other past-their-prime actors (at least, in Hollywood's terms) on the AIP roster included Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Buster Keaton, and Joe E. Brown. And the parts weren't always small. Lorre received star billing on three horror films at AIP: Corman's Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), and Jacques Tourneur's The Comedy of Terrors (1964). It wasn't much, but it was the closest Lorre came to a "last hurrah."

Lorre's life and career ended suddenly in 1964, just four days after he had finished a small role in Jerry Lewis's wacky comedy The Patsy.

In spite of the monstrosity of some of his roles, Lorre concealed the extent of his personal suffering from drug addiction, yet managed to reveal the humanity that lurked beneath the bulging eyes and sinister voice that had become a Hollywood stereotype. Writing a review of Mad Love, novelist Graham Greene provides what might be an eloquent eulogy for the unique actor. "Lorre, with every physical handicap, can convince you of the goodness, the starved tenderness, of his vice-entangled souls. Those marbly pupils in the pasty spherical face are like the eye-pieces of a microscope, through which you can see laid flat on the slide the entangled mind of a man: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair, jumping out of the jelly."

by Bret Wood