Did Peter Lorre come into this world with a sinister sneer fully formed on his lips? Was he at heart a sniveling, treacherous, conniving creep? Not at all, though from the moment American moviegoers set eyes on him, Lorre was a favorite of directors and screenwriters looking for just the right touch of evil—and audiences believed that he was evil indeed.
Born László Löwenstein on June 26, 1904, in a small but prosperous town in Hungary, Lorre moved to Vienna as soon as he could. He later said that he had studied there with Sigmund Freud, but about his early years we can only guess, since Lorre invented details of his past as he invented the characters for which he would become famous. What is certain is that he started out poor, a habitué of smoky coffeehouses who ate so seldom that, he remembered, “I am the only actor, I believe, who really had scurvy.”
Still, he survived, and he rose from small parts in strange “therapeutic” dramas to become a regular player in some of the city’s leading theaters. He graduated to film earning renown for his portrayal of a serial killer in Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931). Still young, but already a seasoned player by virtue of theatrical work with the playwright Bertolt Brecht in Berlin, Lorre so completely inhabited the part that, in no time at all, he was—or so he claimed—offered “dozens of villainous roles.”
Work is work, Lorre knew, but he also recognized the danger inherent in being typecast. Besides, he really wanted to do comedy. Still, he went off to London for a turn in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and then, in time, to America, having wisely escaped from Germany a step ahead of the Gestapo.
No sooner did he arrive in Hollywood than Lorre found himself in a familiar role, that of the psychopathic killer in Mad Love (a.k.a.) The Hands of Orlac. He brought a curious pride of workmanship to the grade Z part, believing that it was his job to introduce “a new kind of villainy to the cinema.” Filmgoers noticed the man billed as “America’s strangest sensation,” and in time he was indeed bringing a new kind of villainy to the screen, now as the high-voiced, worldly, but definitely bad likes of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and Ugarte in Casablanca, in which he uttered the memorable line, “You know, Rick, I have many a friend in Casablanca, but somehow, just because you despise me, you are the only one I trust.”
From there, alas, the road led downward. It didn’t help that Lorre was addicted to various substances, or that he despised himself, or that he had few friends, or that he was politically suspect during the days of the blacklist, or that he was consistently underpaid almost everywhere he worked and was “chronically short of money and long on bad luck.” From Casablanca to The Patsy is a long fall, and Lorre knew it. Being praised as one of the greatest actors in history but reduced to supporting Fabian could hardly have cheered him.
Peter Lorre died of a stroke on March 23, 1964, intestate and insolvent, not long after having pitched a remake of M. The studio head declined, fearing there would be no market for it, at which point, as Stephen D. Youngkin remarks in his careful biography of Lorre, The Lost One, the actor probably wondered whether “he should have stayed in Europe and faced Hitler.”
Yet Lorre lives on in curious ways: slyly traced by Robin Williams’s genie in Aladdin, appropriated by a breakfast cereal, hijacked to serve as the voice of a demented Chihuahua in a cartoon series and as the inspiration for a particularly weasel-like species of aliens in a popular space opera. Those ghostly echoes are apt, but the man who made them was an actor, and a man, worthy of more enduring monuments. The best of his films will do nicely.
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