Peter Lorre (born László Löwenstein; June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964) was a Hungarian and American actor, active first in Europe and later in the United States. Known for his timidly devious characters, appearance, and accented voice, he was frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner. He was caricatured throughout his life and his cultural legacy remains in the media today.
He began his stage career in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before moving to Germany, where he worked first on the stage, then in film, in Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre, who was Jewish, left Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. Lorre caused an international sensation in the Weimar Republic–era film M (1931), in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls. His first English-language film was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), made in the United Kingdom.
Eventually settling in Hollywood, he later became a featured player in many Warner Bros. crime and mystery films. He acted in Mad Love (1935), Crime and Punishment (1935), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Passage to Marseille (1944), and My Favorite Brunette (1947). During this time he acted in several films alongside Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet.
Lorre played Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, in a series of B-pictures from 1937 to 1939, and was the first actor to play a James Bond villain as Le Chiffre in a TV version of Casino Royale (1954). He later starred in films such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Silk Stockings (1957), and The Comedy of Terrors (1963). Some of his last roles were in horror films directed by Roger Corman. In 2017, The Daily Telegraph named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Lorre was born László Löwenstein on June 26, 1904, in Rózsahegy, now known as Ružomberok, a town then in the Kingdom of Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now in Slovakia. He was the first child of German-speaking Hungarian Jews Elvira (née Freischberger) and Alajos Löwenstein. The couple had recently moved there following Alajos's appointment as chief bookkeeper at a local textile mill. Alajos also served as a lieutenant in Austria's reserve force and was often away on military maneuvers.
Elvira died when Lorre was four years old, leaving Alajos with three very young sons. Alajos soon married Elvira's best friend Melanie Klein, with whom he had two more children. However, Lorre and Melanie never got along, and this colored his childhood memories. Anticipating that he might be conscripted following the outbreak of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Alajos moved the family to Vienna. Following the outbreak of World War I, he served on the Eastern Front during the winter of 1914–1915 before being put in command of a prison camp due to heart trouble.
Lorre began acting on stage in Vienna at age 17, working with Viennese Art Nouveau artist and puppeteer Richard Teschner. He then moved to Breslau and later to Zürich. In the late 1920s, the actor moved to Berlin, where he worked with Bertolt Brecht, including a role in Brecht's Man Equals Man and as Dr. Nakamura in the musical Happy End. During this time, he earned his stage name from a theater manager who compared his appearance to children's book character Struwwelpeter (Shock-headed Peter).
Lorre became much better known after director Fritz Lang cast him as child-killer Hans Beckert in M (1931), a film reputedly inspired by the Peter Kürten case. Lang said that he had Lorre in mind for the part and did not give him a screen test because he was already convinced Lorre was perfect for the part. He stated that the actor gave his best performance in M and that it was among the most distinguished in film history. Sharon Packer observed that Lorre played the "loner, [and] schizotypal murderer" with "raspy voice, bulging eyes, and emotive acting (a holdover from the silent screen) [which] always make him memorable."
In 1932, Lorre appeared alongside Hans Albers in the science fiction film F.P.1 antwortet nicht about an artificial island in the mid-Atlantic.
When the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, Lorre took refuge first in Paris and then London, where he was noticed by Ivor Montagu, associate producer for The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), who reminded the film's director, Alfred Hitchcock, about Lorre's performance in M. They considered him to play the assassin, but wanted to use him in a larger role despite his limited command of English, which Lorre overcame by learning much of his part phonetically. In 2014, in The Guardian, Michael Newton wrote, "Lorre cannot help but steal each scene; he's a physically present actor, often, you feel, surrounded as he is by the pallid English, the only one in the room with a body."
Lorre and his first wife, actress Celia Lovsky, boarded the Cunard-White Star Liner RMS Majestic in Southampton on July 18, 1934, to sail for New York a day after shooting had been completed on The Man Who Knew Too Much, having gained visitor's visas to the United States.
After his first two American films, Lorre returned to England to feature in Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936).
First years in Hollywood (1935–1940)
Lorre settled in Hollywood and was soon under contract to Columbia Pictures, which had difficulty finding parts suitable for him. After some months of research, Lorre decided on Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky as a suitable project with himself in the central role. Columbia's head Harry Cohn agreed to make the film adaptation on the condition that he could lend Lorre to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, possibly as a means of recouping the cost of Lorre not appearing in any of his films.
For MGM's Mad Love (1935), set in Paris and directed by Karl Freund, Lorre's head was shaved for the role of Dr. Gogol, a demented surgeon who replaces the wrecked hands of a concert pianist with those of an executed knife murderer. An actress who works at the nearby Grand Guignol theater, who happens to be the pianist's wife, is the subject of Gogol's unwelcome infatuation. "Lorre triumphs superbly in a characterization that is sheer horror", The Hollywood Reporter commented. "There is perhaps no one who can be so repulsive and so utterly wicked. No one who can smile so disarmingly and still sneer. His face is his fortune".
Lorre followed Mad Love with the lead role in Crime and Punishment (also 1935) directed by Josef von Sternberg. "Although Peter Lorre is occasionally able to give the film a frightening pathological significance," wrote Andre Sennwald in The New York Times on the film's release, "this is scarcely Dostoievsky's drama of a tortured brain drifting into madness with a terrible secret." Columbia offered him a five-year contract at $1,000 a week (equivalent to $23,483 in 2025), but he declined.
Returning from England after appearing in a second Hitchcock picture (Secret Agent, 1936), he was offered and accepted a 3-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Starring in a series of Mr. Moto movies, Lorre played John P. Marquand's character, a Japanese detective and spy. Initially positive about the films, he soon grew frustrated. "The role is childish," he said, and eventually tended to dismiss the films entirely. He twisted his shoulder during a stunt in Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (1939), the penultimate entry of the series. In 1939, he attended a lunch at the request of some visiting Japanese officials; Lorre wore a badge that read "Boycott Japanese goods."
Late in 1938, Universal Pictures wanted to borrow Lorre from Fox for the top-billed titular role ultimately performed by Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein (1939) starring Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster and Bela Lugosi as Ygor. Lorre declined the role because he thought his menacing parts were now behind him, although he was ill at this time. He tested successfully in 1937 for the role of Quasimodo in an aborted MGM version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, according to a Fox publicist one of two roles Lorre most wanted to play, the other being Napoleon. Frustrated by broken promises from Fox, Lorre managed to end his contract.