Peter Lorre ✝

Lorre left Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. 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. His first film at Warner was The Maltese Falcon (1941), which began a sequence in which he appeared with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. This was followed by Casablanca (1942), the second of the nine films in which Lorre and Greenstreet appeared together. Lorre\'s other films include Frank Capra\'s Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Disney\'s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Frequently typecast as a sinister foreigner, his later career was erratic. Lorre was the first actor to play a James Bond villain as Le Chiffre in a TV version of Casino Royale (1954). Some of his last roles were in horror films directed by Roger Corman.\n', ' Lorre was born László Löwenstein (Hungarian: Löwenstein László) on 26 June 1904, the first child of Alajos Löwenstein and his wife Elvira Freischberger, in the Hungarian town of Rózsahegy in Liptó County (German: Rosenberg; Slovak: Ružomberok, now in Slovakia). His parents, who were Jewish, had only recently moved there following his father\'s appointment as chief bookkeeper at a local textile mill. Alajos also served as a lieutenant in the Austrian Army Reserve, which meant that he was often away on military maneuvers.\n', ' László\'s mother died when he was only four years old, leaving Alajos with three very young sons, the youngest several months old. He soon married his wife\'s best friend Melanie Klein, with whom he had two more children. However, Lorre and his stepmother never got along, and this colored his childhood memories. At the outbreak of the Second Balkan War in 1913, anticipating that this would lead to a larger conflict and that he would be called up, Alajos moved the family to Vienna. He served on the Eastern Front during the winter of 1914–1915, before being put in charge of a prison camp due to heart trouble.\n', '