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With his bulging eyes, distinctive voice, and quietly chilling demeanor, Peter Lorre wasn’t Hollywood’s idea of a leading man, but he found steady work as a supporting player and became one of the cinema’s favorite bad guys. Born László Löwenstein in what’s now Slovakia in 1904, he began working in the Vienna theater community as a teenager. By the late 1920s he was a top stage actor in Austria and Germany. After a small uncredited role in the 1929 silent drama The Missing Wife, Lorre achieved international movie fame when director Fritz Lang chose him to play a whistling child killer hunted by both the police and the underworld in the chilling crime drama M.
Leaving Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power, Peter made his English-language film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, learning his lines phonetically. Eventually moving to Hollywood, Lorre would bring characters both sinister and sympathetic to life on the screen over the next 30 years before his death in 1964. Among his most memorable roles were deranged surgeon Dr. Gogol in Mad Love; Japanese sleuth Mr. Moto; gardenia-scented criminal Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon; Casablanca’s “cut-rate” black marketeer Ugarte; and astrology-obsessed personal secretary Hilary Cummins in The Beast with Five Fingers.
His menacing presence was used to comedic effect in such films as Arsenic and Old Lace and My Favorite Brunette, and he was often parodied in animated cartoons. Lorre also has the distinction of being Hollywood’s first Bond villain when he played Le Chiffre in a 1954 TV adaptation of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, opposite Barry Nelson as an Americanized 007.
To mark his birthday this Thursday, we’d like to know which of Lorre’s characters you most enjoyed. Please vote below, and if we failed to include your favorite work of his, tell us in the comments.