Classic Horror Behind the Scenes: Being Peter Lorre

The versatile star was one of the most memorable character actors who has ever lived, but he was trapped by the one role that Hollywood wouldn’t let him shake: himself.

By Bill Fleck, author of the Rondo-nominated book CHANEY’S BABY, available here.

(Note: Much of the information contained in this article comes from Stephen D. Youngkin’s comprehensive biography THE LOST ONE: A LIFE OF PETER LORRE. If you enjoy this write-up, I highly encourage you to seek out Youngkin’s book here.)

October 26, 1962. The O’Hare Inn, adjacent to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, IL.

Peter Lorre, 58, is standing in a banquet hall next to Tod Stiles, his assistant for the day. A group of young, female secretaries—all of whom are attractive, of course—are gathered here this afternoon as part of their convention activities.

But their agenda says nothing about being attacked by the Wolf Man.

An attendee with brunette hair is the first victim. A hairy hand suddenly appears and—like a gentleman—lights her cigarette.

She screams in horror when she realizes exactly who that hand belongs to and faints.  

“Case one,” Lorre dictates in his famous bedroom voice as the blond Styles scribbles quickly on a notepad. “Instant paralysis. Total loss of speech.”

The Wolf Man emits a hearty chuckle, then growls and menacingly approaches five more of the secretaries. He leaps up on a banquet table, startling them.

Their piercing screams end in faints as well.

“Cases two to six,” Lorre gleefully observes. “Spontaneous collapse.”

Now, four others are dashing frantically across the room in search of safety from the leering beast that’s hunched over their fallen friends.

“I like that!” Lorre says with perverted relish.

So, obviously, does the Wolf Man, who growls once again, freezing the four runners in sheer fright. After helpless cries, they, too, crumble to the floor.

“I’m going down to the kitchen,” Styles nervously announces, obviously concerned by what is unfolding before his very eyes. “You’d better go back to your room.”

But a fascinated Lorre prefers to stay. Immediately, three more panicked secretaries rush toward him. Lorre flashes them a little smile.

They screech and keel over at the sight of him.

“These three passed out just from looking at me,” Lorre whines as a laughing Wolf Man pats him on the shoulder. “I think I resent that!”

It’s a great moment from a great episode in an often-great TV show named ROUTE 66 (1960-1964).

But for Peter Lorre, it’s a joke that’s too close to home.

[Above: Peter Lorre flashes three attractive secretaries a smile. They faint as a result. “I think I resent that!” he tells the Wolf Man. It’s a running joke that—for Lorre—is too close to home (from “Lizard’s Egg and Owlet’s Wing,” TV’s ROUTE 66, 1962).]

Dreamed up by Herbert B. Leonard and Sterling Silliphant, ROUTE 66 stars Martin Milner as Tod Stiles and George Maharis as Buz Murdock, two young men who travel the USA in search of adventure and girls…and not necessarily in that order.

In this particular episode—entitled LIZARD’S EGG AND OWLET’S WING [1]—Stiles and Murdock just happen to find themselves working at the O’Hare Inn when the secretaries arrive…along with actors Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Lon Chaney, Jr., who are planning on producing a new horror series for TV.

Thus, the running joke about Lorre’s faint-inducing visage when appearing in public as…well, himself. (The Wolf Man’s surprise attack, an in-show experiment to see if he can still frighten anyone, sets up the gag perfectly.) [2]

But for Lorre, being ‘Peter Lorre’ is getting old.

It wasn’t always this way.

He’s born László Löwenstein on June 26, 1904 in what is now Slovakia, the oldest son of three born to Alajos Löwenstein and Elvira Freischberger. Sadly, his mom dies when he’s just four. Alajos remarries and has two more children, but young Lorre clashes with his stepmom and longs to get away from home.

By the age of 17, the five-three actor with the dark hair and sleepy brown eyes is taking the stage in Vienna, where Jacob Moreno—a self-styled psycho-dramatist—decides he needs a new moniker.

“Moreno couldn’t release this talented unknown into the world without giving him a more suitable professional name,” notes Lorre’s biographer Stephen D. Youngkin. “The psycho-dramatist borrowed his friend Peter Altenberg’s Christian name, bemusedly recalling the actor’s resemblance to the character of Struwwelpeter, an unruly young man in German children’s literature…For a surname, Moreno suggested Lorre, which means ‘parrot’ in German” (Youngkin, p. 19).

“Parrot seemed the right designation for him,” Zerka Moreno—Jacob’s wife—would later explain. “Probably Lorre’s ability at mimicry was the source of the inspiration” (Youngkin, p. 19).

By 1929, Lorre has moved his base to Germany where his talent for mimicry—coupled with his intense style—attracts the attention of noted playwright Bertolt Brecht.

He also attracts the attention of 32-year-old Austrian actress Celia Lovsky, who becomes his live-in companion, and—in 1934—his first wife. It’s through Lovsky’s acquaintance with famed director Fritz Lang that Lorre lands the film role that puts him on the map—Hans Beckert, the child-killing maniac in Lang’s masterpiece, “M” (1931).

“In my first picture [3], I was a child killer,” he will laugh later. “You can’t be worse than that. Since then, I’ve graduated to grownups.”

[Above: Lorre made it big in films thanks to M (1931). His then-girlfriend—and soon-to-be wife—Celia Lovsky introduced him to director Fritz Lang, and the rest is history.]

Sadly, his promising career in Germany is cut short in 1933 thanks to the rise of one Adolph Hitler. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the Jewish Lorre reluctantly—but correctly—decides it would be best for he and Celia to relocate to England.

It’s not an easy decision to make.

“I think he felt had Hitler not happened, and had he gone on as Bertolt Brecht’s actor, he would have been himself and been appreciated for what he really was,” notes Wendy Sanford, an associate producer at CBS who became close to Lorre late in his life. “I don’t think he ever found himself again after that.”

When Ivor Montague—an associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock’s proposed THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934)—discovers that Lorre is in London, he notifies the director that the star of “M” is available for the project. Hitch jumps at the chance in spite of Lorre’s struggles with English. [4] Both Lorre and the film turn out to be hits.

But by the time THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH hits theaters, Lorre and Lovsky are already in Hollywood. (He’ll become a U.S. citizen in 1941.)

Signed to Columbia, Lorre desires to star in an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. But studio head Harry Cohn—who is anything but a highbrow—isn’t having it…unless Lorre will agree to go over to MGM and film something that will eventually be called MAD LOVE (1935).

We Monster Kids know exactly how that worked out.

True, the film wasn’t a hit. According to Gregory William Mank, it actually lost $39,000 on its initial run (Mank, p. 149).

Still, MAD LOVE has since come down as a horror classic. And noted film critic Pauline Kael even credited it with influencing CITIZEN KANE (1941). [5]

Of course, it’s Lorre’s bizarre but hypnotic portrayal of the mad Dr. Gogol that sells the film.

“Lorre triumphs superbly in a characterization that is sheer horror,” The Hollywood Reporter noted at the time. “There is perhaps no one who can be so repulsive and so utterly wicked. No one who can smile so disarmingly and still sneer. His face is his fortune.” [6]

Forty years later, Calvin Thomas Beck will claim that certain aspects of Lorre’s performance “would have been envied by Lon Chaney, Sr.” (Beck, p. 199).

[Above: Lorre as Dr. Gogol in MAD LOVE (1935). Though initially not a financial success, it has since come down as a classic horror film…mostly thanks to Lorre’s performance.]

But ultimately, Columbia doesn’t work out for him. The second half of the 1930s finds him at 20^th Century Fox, churning out MR. MOTO movies—Lorre stars as the Japanese detective.

In 1938, he turns down the part of Wolf in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) because he feels he no longer has to play in such films.

Of course, he’s wrong.

Sure, there’s a marvelous period for him at Warner Brothers. He scores memorable parts in classic films like THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), CASABLANCA (1942), and ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944), where he’s wonderfully comic as Dr. Einstein.

Along the way, he becomes good friends with Warner’s star Humphrey Bogart…unusual for Lorre, since he’s beginning to become disappointed in actors and acting, which he disparages by calling it “facemaking.” (“I don’t sign contracts,” he’ll tell his agent Arthur Kennard in later years. “I make the faces, you make the deals.”)

“People interest me more than facemakers do,” he’ll often say. “I don’t like most actors. They’re a breed unto themselves…They’re all the same bores.”

But Bogie is different.

“He believed in the no-questions-asked kind of friendship he enjoyed with Bogart and only a few others built on nuts-and-bolts professionalism,” Youngkin explains.

Lorre’s loyalty to Bogie includes letting his friend sleep away drunken nights at his home—so as to avoid the wrath of Bogie’s soon-to-be-ex Mayo Methot—and vacating his ranch so that Bogie and Lauren Bacall can be together without being scrutinized by the press.

And when Bogie laments that the twenty-five-year age difference between he and Bacall is too much, it’s Lorre who persuades him to stick around.

“Five good years are better than none,” he sagely advises. [7]

[Above: Lorre as Joel Cairo in John Huston’s THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). Lorre’s five-year association with Warner Brothers was arguably the best period of his career. Becoming close friends with fellow “facemaker” Humphrey Bogart was a welcome bonus.]

By 1945, Lorre’s divorced from Lovsky, though they’ll remain lifelong friends. He marries Kaaren Verne, a German-born actress shortly after, and finishes his Warner’s deal with one of his most famous films, the Gothic thriller THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946).

Still, his notoriety—thanks to facemaking—oddly affects him, as does his medically-induced on-again, off-again issues with morphine. [8] A downturn in his earnings following the Second World War forces him into bankruptcy in 1949. And he divorces again in 1950.

That same year, he goes back to Germany to direct, co-write, and star in THE LOST ONE (1951). Lorre plays a German scientist doing research under the radar for the Nazis. He murders his girlfriend when he realizes that she’s been selling his secrets to the enemy. Unfortunately for Lorre, the from-the-heart project doesn’t make any money.

[Above: THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (Columbia, 1941). In 1938, Lorre had turned down SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, believing that such films were behind him. He was wrong. Later in life, he was frustrated that he had to wear a figurative ‘Peter Lorre’ mask in order to get any work.]

Bankruptcy or no, Peter Lorre is still one of the most recognizable people in the world…a situation he handles in various ways. [9]

“Publicly, most people saw the same Peter Lorre,” Youngkin notes, “a man who role-played a give-and-take game with his screen image, becoming both perpetrator and victim of his typecast.”

As such, when approached for autographs, the shy, sensitive actor is often taken aback.

“Well, I’m not that important,” he’ll say, begging off. “I’m not that important now.’”

Or, he’ll humorously pretend that he isn’t actually Peter Lorre at all.

“Do you know what a scoundrel he is?” he mock-explodes at a lady who’s addressed him in a restaurant. “You just can’t go around telling people that.”

[Above: Lorre with Victor Francen in THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946), one of Lorre’s most famous performances. Sadly, it was the last picture of his Warner Brothers sojourn.]

According to Youngkin, Peter’s friend Jonas Silverstone “thought that many of Lorre’s pranks were forced.”

“Basically, Peter was a very serious man,” Silverstone tells Youngkin. “I think he was playing a point-counterpoint of his own direction. Peter gave the appearance of loving fun and he did like fun very much, but I do think he was driving himself to have fun, particularly toward the end. But above all, I think Peter was and remained a very serious man, full of tragedy. I think he was very aware of it.”

This may be part of the reason that, at times, he acknowledges that there are certain benefits to being Peter Lorre…though such acknowledgments are generally lampooned by a punchline:

“Not the least of which,” he’ll say of the benefits, “is not losing a part to William Holden.”

But how does he feel about watching himself on the screen?

“I look at the man before me,” he drawls, “and wonder where I’ve seen him!”

July 21, 1953. Lorre marries again—this time, to Anne Marie Brenning, 31. He’s met the German-born Anne Marie at Wiggers Kurheim sanatorium in Bavaria, where they are both patients—it’s yet another attempt by Lorre to kick the morphine habit. The marriage is obviously a shotgun situation, since exactly two months later—September 21, 1953—their daughter Catharine is born.

“She looks like me, but it looks better on her,” Peter supposedly says after her birth.

[Above: Anne Marie, Peter, and Catharine Lorre, c. 1957. The troubled couple met at a sanatorium in Bavaria. Catharine was Lorre’s only child. Sadly, Lorre’s health was deteriorating—he had high blood pressure and had gained considerable weight. Anne Marie was an alcoholic. They separated for good in 1962. Catharine died of complications due to juvenile diabetes in 1985 at only 31.]

Becoming a parent at 49 forces Lorre to become more concerned with finances…obviously, he desires to leave a decent inheritance to his daughter. But his macabre sense of humor remains intact.

For example, when asked how he plans to treat Catherine’s future suitors, he is typically—but comically—sardonic.

“I think I’ll just kill them,” he cracks.

All humor aside, the marriage is a rocky one. Lorre has gained considerable weight—he will eventually be one-hundred pounds more than the 130 he carries in his prime—and is in poor health thanks to high blood pressure. For her part, Anne Marie drinks too much. Their battles take a turn for the worse in 1956. By 1962—around the time Peter Lorre is once again playing himself and watching the Wolf Man attack secretaries—they separate for good. [10]

So, while Lorre enjoys making the ROUTE 66 episode—“Oh, that was a fun show,” he’ll tell noted memorabilia collector Bob Burns later. “That was fun to do, getting together with Boris and all the guys”—he has yet another marriage crumbling, and he needs money now more than ever.

Which means that he needs to be ‘Peter Lorre’ now more than ever.

[Above: A color snap by memorabilia collector Bob Burns on the set of “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” (ROUTE 66, 1962). Though some of the jokes took potshots at his admittedly strange and haggard looks, Lorre enjoyed making the episode: “That was fun to do, getting together with Boris and all the guys.”]

“I think he felt it was all over and he was just marking time making a living,” mused Kirk Douglas, Lorre’s co-star in 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954) [11], “…that he had not done as much with his talents as he could have, but then one has to make a living.”

Lorre’s friend James Powers agrees.

“He thought of himself as an intellectual and a serious actor,” Powers tells Youngkin. “But he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be a serious artist or a popular guy. He wasn’t taking it seriously himself. He never made the choice. As he grew older, his choice of options diminished.”

“Peter always had a melancholy something about him,” said singer and friend Burl Ives. “I don’t think that he was ever a jolly, happy-go-lucky man. I think he was basically thoughtful and philosophic, and deep. He was a thinking person and concerned himself with much deeper realms of human ambitions, thoughts and desires, all human considerations, than the average person would have suspected. He was a very alive, but controlled man.”

If Ives’s insight is correct, it’s no wonder that Lorre was frustrated by the parts he was offered in his last years.

“Lorre is just a fascinating figure,” Rondo-winning director Thomas Hamilton (BORIS KARLOFF: THE MAN BEHIND THE MONSTER) told me, “because he just had so much more talent than Hollywood could handle in a way, but he forged a really successful career. But you can see that, as he was going along, he was starting to take it less and less seriously. It was just kind of like, you know, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I prostituting myself?’ But he never gave less than great work.”

Adding to Lorre’s melancholy is a feeling he can’t shake:

“On COMEDY OF TERRORS [1963],” Youngkin writes, “he could not hide what everyone knew—that he was dying. Film historian Mark Thomas McGee, who visited the set as a young boy, remembered that ‘after every scene he would slump back into his chair and wheeze for several minutes.’ When prop man Bob Burns introduced himself to Lorre as the guy ‘with his head,’ a latex rubber ‘Peter Lorre’ mask worn by stuntman Harvey [Parry] for scenes requiring the actor to perform even modest physical feats, he replied, ‘Well, it’s a good thing, because I’m not well. I can’t really do much in this film.’”

[Above: With Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone. By the early 1960s, Lorre was a very sick man who tired easily. Still, in true ‘Peter Lorre’ style, he cracked jokes and often made up his own lines on the spot while cameras turned. Price in particular adored him.]

This is not to suggest that Lorre’s every waking moment is a torment. He enjoys working with fellow actor Vincent Price—whom he has known professionally for years [12]—and makes a great many friends among the staff at the Hampshire Hotel in New York City by tipping generously while on a promotional tour for THE RAVEN in 1963.

“Soon,” Youngkin writes, “the hotel employees fought to serve him.”

But his energy noticeably ebbs as his time runs out.

“Peter was afraid to exert himself too much,” Lorre’s friend, costume designer Paul Zastupnevich, tells Youngkin about the actor’s time on THE PATSY (1964), “because he tired very easily and he wanted to try to save himself for the scene. Once or twice, when he was extremely tired and would fluff his lines, he got very angry with himself because he did not like to hold up his fellow actors.”

With things obviously going downhill in the present, Lorre understandably begins to romanticize the past…and not always accurately.

“The actor loved to give advice about young talents tempted by money,” Youngkin explains, “based not on his own experiences, but on his reworking of them, reordered into carefully weighed advantages and disadvantages.”

“He loved to tell stories of when Hollywood was Hollywood,” said singer Frankie Avalon, “and particularly about Bogie and Warner Bros. He was kind of reliving that in his mind.”

Among Lorre’s musings? All the great drinkers were gone:

“They just don’t make drinkers the way they used to,” he frets. “I don’t want to sound eulogistic about those times, but dammit, they were great. Today isn’t so great. The drinking has slowed down. I don’t think it’s just age that has done it.”

“Caught between the present and the reinvented past, Lorre had lost his way,” Youngkin asserts.

“I think he embroidered his past for the sake of being an interesting and amusing companion,” Wendy Sanford tells Youngkin. “He felt that he was not being used properly and wanted everyone to know that there was more to him than what was on the screen.”

Which, of course, there was.

Monday, March 23, 1964. A cloudy day with rain likely and thundershowers possible. Temperatures are expected to be in the mid-fifties.

Peter and Ann Marie Lorre are due in court for their divorce hearing.

Peter isn’t going to make it.

Beatrice Lane, Lorre’s maid, finds him on the floor in his pajamas when she gets to his apartment at about noon. Hoping that he’s only unconscious, she calls Celia, who rushes over.

Celia then calls Joe Golenternak, Lorre’s physician. But there’s nothing for it.

Peter Lorre—three months shy of 60—is dead.

“By the location of the body,” Youngkin writes, “it appeared as if he had gotten up, perhaps to open or close the window, and suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. According to [Lorre’s attorney Robert] Shutan, who arrived soon after, Lorre wore the face of gentle sleep.”

[Above: The announcement of Lorre’s death on page one of THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, March 24, 1962. A cerebral hemorrhage took his life at the age of 59.]

As the news spreads throughout Tinseltown, the tributes dribble in, director John Huston (THE MALTESE FALCON) among them:

“He was so good as a menace,” Huston opines, “that the movie moguls tended to waste him in horror films. He could do anything well—except play romantic leads.”

Or, as it turns out, handle his money…

Though his estate is appraised at $13,000—a bit more than $126,000 at this writing—the money is attached by the IRS because Lorre hadn’t paid back-taxes prior to going bankrupt in 1949.

Then, too, he leaves no will. Dying intestate is more bad news for his daughter.

“Sadly, he left young Catharine nothing in the way of financial security,” Youngkin notes, “which had been one of his greatest fears.”

But, of course, he did leave a legacy, a degree of immortality in a variety of films…even if he’d built it on, well, “making faces”…

…the most famous of which was Peter Lorre.

Vincent Price said it best in his eulogy at Lorre’s funeral.

“The snow statue of his work perhaps will melt away, but the solid substance of his self must last. Man’s immortality is man, his family, his friends and in the actor’s dream of life, the audience—his identity with them … and this man was the most identifiable actor I ever knew.”

NOTES

[1] A phrase taken from Shakespeare’s famous “Double, double toil and trouble” spell in MACBETH.

[2] “I wish my grandson Ron was here to see this sight,” the Wolf Man tells Lorre in an interesting reference to Chaney Jr.’s actual grandson, Ronald Kurt Chaney. “You know, he was starting to not believe in me no more. But if he saw this sight, he’d have a wonderful time!” At this writing, there is no one who does more to keep the legacy of Lon Jr.—and Jr.’s father—alive than Ron Chaney.

[3] “M” was actually his third film. He appeared in two small parts in German films prior to starring as Beckert.

[4] Legend has it that Lorre had to learn much of his dialogue phonetically.

[5] Interestingly, KANE cinematographer Gregg Toland worked on MAD LOVE for eight days of what was called “additional photography” (Mank, p. 130).

[6] Reproduced in: Bartłomiej Paszylk, THE PLEASURE AND PAIN OF CULT HORROR FILMS: AN HISTORICAL SURVEY. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009, pp. 34–36. Print.

[7] When Bogie dies on January 14, 1957—at the relatively young age of 57—Lorre is devastated. “My dearest pal,” he’ll often say. “I still feel the void.” Bogie’s death comes exactly five months after that of Bertolt Brecht…which was another shocking loss for Lorre.

[8] Lorre’s gall bladder caused him untold agony, as did some botched medical treatments and surgeries to correct it. Doctors prescribed the opiate to relieve his suffering. While making the MR. MOTO series, Lorre supposedly kicked the habit, though there were obvious relapses. (See Youngkin, p. 499).

[9] “Andrew Lorre knew just how his brother felt,” Youngkin notes. “There was a strong family resemblance in appearance and voice,” Andrew is quoted, “even our father never knew which one of us called. Often I was told that I talked ‘just like Peter Lorre,’ to which my reply was, ‘Yes, but he is getting paid for it.’ Twice, once in Amsterdam and again in Australia, I was mobbed by reporters who mistook me for him.”

[10] Following her mother’s death in 1971, Celia Lovsky—Peter’s first wife—found housing for 17-year-old Catharine. Catharine also grew close to Kaaren Verne, Peter’s second wife. Incredibly, Catharine was almost kidnapped and killed by the Hillside Stranglers (Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi) in 1977. They let her go upon finding out that she was Peter Lorre’s daughter. Catherine learned of their plans only after their capture. Sadly, her husband Allen Baker was killed in a motorcycle accident on October 16, 1981 at the age of 36. Catharine herself died from complications related to juvenile diabetes on May 7, 1985, a few months shy of her 32^nd birthday.

[11] Like Lorre, Douglas was Jewish and worked under a stage name. He was born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916.

[12] The two had even made a TV pilot called COLLECTOR’S ITEM (1957), in which they played art dealers who end up trying to solve a mystery. The show was, unfortunately, not picked up.

SOURCES

Beck, Calvin Thomas. HEROES OF THE HORRORS. New York: Collier Books, 1975. Print.

“Find a Grave.” ALLEN CORNWELL BAKER. www.findagrave.com. Web.

“Find a Grave.” ANNE MARIE BRENNING LORRE. www.findagrave.com. Web.

Kael, Pauline. “Raising Kane.” THE NEW YORKER. February 12, 1971. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/02/20/raising-kane-i

Ledger, Denny. “Peter Lorre.” THE BOGIE FILM BLOG. July 11, 2013. www.bogiefilmblog.wordpress.com. Web.

Lobosco, David. “The Sad Life of Catharine Lorre.” A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. March 4, 2019. Web.

Mank, Gregory William. HOLLYWOOD CAULDRON. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co., Inc., 1994. Print.

“Official Weather Report.” THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. March 23, 1964, p. 53. Print.

Trimborn, Harry. “Movie Villain Peter Lorre Found Dead in His Hollywood Apartment.” THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. March 24, 1964, p.1. Accessed on the web.

Youngkin, Stephen D. THE LOST ONE: A LIFE OF PETER LORRE. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Ebook.

Zoom Interview with director Thomas Hamilton, March 25, 2023.

Note: The photos contained herein are intended for educational purposes only. I do not own the copyrights.