Peter Lorre

PETER LORRE d1964. Austro-Hungarian-American actor. In Austria, he began his stage career in Vienna before moving to Germany where he had his breakthrough, first on the stage, then in film in Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre caused an international sensation in the German film "M" (1931) in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany after 1933. His first English-language film was Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much"(1934) made in Great Britain. Eventually settling in Hollywood, he later became a featured player in many Hollywood crime and mystery films. In his initial American films Mad Love and Crime and Punishment, he continued to play murderers, but he was then cast playing Mr Moto (the Japanese detective) in a run of B pictures. From 1941 to 1946 he mainly worked for Warner Bros. The first of these films was The Maltese Falcon (1941) which began a sequence in which he appeared with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. This was followed by the classic "Casablanca" (1942), the second of the nine films in which Lorre and Greenstreet appeared. Other films include ; Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and "20000 Leagues Under The Sea"(1954). Frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner, his later career was erratic. He was the first actor to play a James Bond villain (Le Chiffre) in a TV version of Casino Royale (1954). He died of a stroke aged 59 on 23rd March 1964.