Peter Lorre

After some months employed effectively for research, Lorre decided that the 1866 Russian novel Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, would be 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.

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.

Lorre was born László Löwenstein (Löwenstein László) on June 26, 1904, the first child of Alajos Löwenstein and his wife Elvira Freischberger, in the town of Rózsahegy in Liptó County, Kingdom of Hungary (German: Rosenberg; Slovak: Ružomberok, now in Slovakia).

His parents, who were German-speaking Jews, had only recently moved there following his father's appointment as chief bookkeeper at a local textile mill.

Alajos also served as a lieutenant in the Austrian Army Reserve, which meant that he was often away on military maneuvers.

László's mother died when he was four years old, leaving Alajos with three very young sons, the youngest several months old.

He soon married his wife's best friend Melanie Klein, with whom he had two more children.

However, Lorre and his stepmother never got along, and this colored his childhood memories.

At the outbreak of the Second Balkan War in 1913, anticipating that this would lead to a larger conflict and that he would be called up, Alajos moved the family to Vienna.

He served on the Eastern Front during the winter of 1914–15, before being put in charge of a prison camp due to heart trouble.

Lorre began acting on stage in Vienna aged 17, where he worked with Viennese Art Nouveau artist and puppeteer Richard Teschner.

He then moved to Breslau and later to Zürich.

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 in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

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.

Lorre caused an international sensation in the Weimar Republic–era film M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang, in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls.

Known for his timidly devious characters, his appearance, and his accented voice, Lorre was frequently caricaturized during and after his lifetime and the cultural legacy of his persona remains in media today.

Lorre, of Jewish descent, left Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power.

His second English-language film, following the multiple-language version of M (1931), 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 Hollywood crime and mystery films.

The actor 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 while working on the script and did not give him a screen test because he was already convinced that Lorre was perfect for the part.

The director said 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 came to 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 first considered him to play the assassin in the film, but wanted to use him in a larger role despite his limited command of English at the time, which Lorre overcame by learning much of his part phonetically.

Lorre and his first wife, actress Celia Lovsky, boarded a Cunard liner 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.

Lorre settled in Hollywood and was soon under contract to Columbia Pictures, which had difficulty finding parts suitable for him.

In his initial American films, Mad Love and Crime and Punishment (both 1935), he continued to play murderers.

He was later cast playing Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, in a series of B-pictures.

After his first two American films, Lorre returned to England to feature in Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936).

From 1941 to 1946, he mainly worked for Warner Bros. His first film at Warner was The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first of many films in which he appeared alongside actors Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet.

This was followed by Casablanca (1942), the second of the nine films in which Lorre and Greenstreet appeared together.

Lorre's other films include Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

Frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner, his later career was erratic.

Lorre was the first actor to play a James Bond villain as Le Chiffre in a TV version of Casino Royale (1954).

Some of his last roles were in horror films directed by Roger Corman.

Michael Newton wrote in an article for The Guardian in September 2014 of his scenes with Leslie Banks in the film: "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."

In 2017, The Daily Telegraph named him one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.