Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s ‘M’.

Peter Lorre (June 26, 1904 – March 23, 1964), born Ladislav (László) Löwenstein, was a Hungarian/American stage and screen actor. He was especially known for playing roles with sinister overtones in Hollywood crime films and mysteries.

Lorre was born into a Jewish family in Rózsahegy/Rosenberg, Austria-Hungary, now Ružomberok, Slovakia. He began acting on stage in Vienna, Breslau, and Zürich. In the late 1920s he moved to Berlin where he worked with German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The German-speaking actor became famous when Fritz Lang cast him as a child killer in his 1931 film M.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Jewish Lorre took refuge first in Paris and then London where he played a charming villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. When he arrived in Great Britain, his first meeting was with Hitchcock and by smiling and laughing as Hitchcock talked, Lorre was able to bluff the director about his limited command of the English language. During the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lorre learned much of his part phonetically.

Lorre enjoyed considerable popularity as a featured player in Warner Bros. suspense and adventure films. Lorre played the role of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and played the role of Ugarte in the film classic Casablanca (1942). It was Lorre’s character who introduced the “letters of transit” (there was no such thing in reality) which became, in some ways, the dramatic center of the film. He played Dr Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace (filmed in 1941, released 1944). In 1946 he starred along with Sidney Greenstreet and Geraldine Fitzgerald in Three Strangers, a suspense film about three people that had three different parts of a winning lottery ticket.