Peter Lorre

Peter Lorre was born in the Hungarian portion of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (now Slovakia), began his acting career on the stage in Vienna, and then moved on to Berlin where he appeared on stage and then also in German movies in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Peter Lorre caused an international sensation in his performance as “Hans Beckert”, the serial killer of children in Fritz Lang’s ground-breaking German mystery suspense thriller movie ‘M’ (1931). When Hitler took over, Peter Lorre, an Askanazi (European) Jew, left Germany for Great Britain and was cast as “Abbott” in Alfred Hitchcock’s British spy thriller movie ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ (1934). He then moved on to Hollywood where his first movies there were Karl Freund’s horror movie ‘Mad Love’ (1935), also starring Colin Clive and Frances Drake, and then in Josef von Sternberg’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ (1935) for Columbia Pictures. He then moved on to make movies for Warner Brothers Pictures. His first for them was John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941), his first of several movies in which he appeared with both Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. The next year he appeared in Michael Curtiz’s classic ‘Casablanca’ (1942), the second of the nine movies Lorre and Greenstreet would appear in together. Two of the other films he is well known for are Frank Capra’s ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ (1944) and Walt Disney’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’ (1954). Near the end of his career, Peter Lorre appeared in several of Roger Corman’s horror movies. Remembering Peter Lorre (26th June, 1904 - 23rd March, 1964).