Peter Lorre

Birth Name: Laszio Lowenstein
Birth Date: June 26, 1904
Deceased: March 23, 1964

Biography

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Peter Lorre  was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actor. He began his stage career in Vienna before moving to Germany where he worked first on the stage, then in film in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre caused an international sensation in the German film M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang, in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls. Lorre left Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. His first English-language film was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who New 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.