By Loren Kantor
STUDIO CITY, California — Peter Lorre was an Austrian-American actor known for playing sinister foreigners. Born Laszlo Lowenstein in 1904 to Jewish parents in present-day Slovakia, Lorre’s mom died of food poisoning when he was only four. As a teenager, Lorre was a student of Sigmund Freud in Vienna.
Lorre began acting at age 17 and he moved to Berlin where he worked with playwright Bertolt Brecht. Lorre came to prominence portraying a child killer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 German film M. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they used Lorre’s image from M as an example of a “typical Jew” for their anti-Semitic film The Eternal Jew. Ironically, Josef Goebbels (a fan of Lorre) warned the Jewish Lorre to leave Germany. Lorre took refuge in Paris then London.
Alfred Hitchcock cast Lorre in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Lorre moved to Hollywood in 1935 and starred in the Mr. Moto films playing a Japanese detective. Lorre appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart in four movies (The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Passage To Marseille and Beat The Devil). Lorre urged Bogart to marry the much younger Lauren Bacall by saying, “Five good years are better than none.”
In 1941, Lorre became a naturalized American citizen. After World War II, Lorre’s career went downhill and he began appearing in lousy horror films and tv game shows. He struggled with gallbladder troubles for years and became addicted to morphine. He kicked his drug addiction but he quickly gained hundreds of pounds in a short period.
At the funeral of his friend Bela Lugosi, Lorre supposedly asked Vincent Price, “Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?”
Lorre had one daughter, Catherine, who gained notoriety for being stopped in her car in Los Angeles in 1977 by the “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi. Bianchi later said he intended to abduct and murder Catherine but he let her go when he learned she was the daughter of Peter Lorre.
Lorre died of a stroke in 1964. Vincent Price read the eulogy at his funeral. Lorre was the inspiration for the character Ren in the cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show.
*
Loren Kantor is a woodcut artist based in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. To see works he has for sale, visit http://woodcuttingfool.blogspot.com/