Peter Lorre

Peter Lorre played the child murderer in M and spent thirty years being cast as the foreigner who cannot be trusted. He was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy, then in Hungary, ran away from home, and worked in Vienna and Berlin in the theatre, including in Brecht's company. Fritz Lang cast him in M in 1931 as Hans Beckert, a man who kills children and cannot stop, and the final speech - in which he pleads that he is pursued by himself while a court of criminals prepares to kill him - made him internationally known at twenty-seven. He was Jewish, left Germany within weeks of the Reichstag fire, and reached London, where Hitchcock cast him in The Man Who Knew Too Much though he spoke almost no English and learned the part phonetically. In Hollywood he made eight films with Sydney Greenstreet, including The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, and was typed as a soft-voiced menace. He was addicted to morphine for years after treatment for gallbladder surgery. The Nazis used footage of him from M in the propaganda film The Eternal Jew without permission. He directed one film, Der Verlorene, in Germany in 1951; it failed and he never directed again. Fox put him in eight films as the Japanese detective Mr Moto between 1937 and 1939, a series he disliked and which paid him. He played the first James Bond villain ever filmed, Le Chiffre, in a live American television version of Casino Royale in 1954. He took comic parts late - Arsenic and Old Lace, and three of Roger Corman's Poe films - and by then was heavy, ill and short of money. He died of a stroke in 1964 at fifty-nine, and Vincent Price read the eulogy at his funeral. His body was cremated and the ashes were only interred decades later.

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