Background

Ethnicity: Lom's father was a Czech nobleman and his mother was Jewish.

Herbert Lom was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru on September 11 or January 9, 1917, in Prague, Austria-Hungary to the family of Count Karl Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru, and Olga Gottlieb. Lom claimed that his family title dated from 1601.

Education

Herbert Lom attended the University of Prague. He studied acting at Prague School of Acting, London Embassy School, Old Vic Theatre School, Sadlers Wells School, and Westminster School.

Career

Lom film debut was in the Czech film Žena pod křížem ("A Woman Under Cross", 1937) followed by the Boží mlýny ("Mills of God", 1938). His early film appearances were mainly supporting roles, with the occasional top billing. At this time he also changed his surname to Lom ("breakage" or "quarry" in Czech), because it was the shortest he found in a local telephone directory. Due to German hostilities and the possibility of an invasion of Czechoslovakia, Lom moved to Britain in January 1939.

Following the outbreak of World War II, Lom took a position as a radio announcer for the BBC. He performed in two films before leaving Prague, and in 1942 he returned to the screen, playing Napoleon in The Young Mr. Pitt. He achieved greater recognition after appearing as a psychiatrist treating a repressed young amnesiac in the popular film The Seventh Veil (1945). In the 1950 noir Night and the City, Lom played a dangerous figure in the high-stakes underground world of professional wrestling.

Having proven himself as a character actor, romantic leading man, and cutthroat villain, Lom turned to comedy with The Ladykillers (1955). That film, which also starred Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, centres on a group of exaggeratedly sinister con men who use an elderly woman’s boarding house as the base for a robbery operation. Lom’s most-enduring comedic role, however, was that of Charles Dreyfus in the popular Pink Panther series. The twitchy commanding officer of Inspector Clouseau (played by Sellers), Dreyfus is repeatedly driven to murderous madness by Clouseau’s antics. The character first appeared in the second of the Pink Panther films, A Shot in the Dark (1964), and Lom reprised the part six more times between 1975 and 1993. His other notable films include Gambit (1966), Hopscotch (1980), and The Dead Zone (1983), a thriller based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.

In addition to acting, Lom is also the author of the 1993 novel Dr. Guillotine: The Eccentric Exploits of an Early Scientist, which explores the relationship between French Enlightenment-era radical Jean-Paul Marat, his eventual assassin, Charlotte Corday, and Dr. Joseph Guillotine, inventor of the beheading device that bears his name. In an appraisal of the novel, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted its comic elements and maintained that, despite the lack of “dramatic focus,” Dr. Guillotine “engages the reader with a sequence of wryly amusing episodes.” Reviewer Karen Stabiner of the Los Angeles Times Book Review commented that Lom presents the inventor of the Guillotine as a humanitarian trying to make executions less painful for the victims. Another book by Lom, Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe, is a novel based on the life of the sixteenth-century British writer and was published in 1978.

Lom died in his sleep on 27 September 2012 at the age of 95. He was cremated. His ashes were sprinkled outside downtown London.

Achievements

• Herbert Lom, the actor, who has died aged 95, brought to the screen a remarkable gallery of monarchs and gangsters, psychiatrists and spies, dictators and assassins, cops and robbers. A ladykiller and several times Napoleon, he will, above all, be remembered as the French police chief driven gradually mad by the antics of Peter Sellers’s Inspector Jacques Clouseau in the long-running Pink Panther series of films.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Dr Guillotine: The Eccentric Exploits of an Early Scientist

    (Explores the French Revolution from the points of view of...)

    1993
  • Enter a Spy: the Double Life of Christopher Marlowe 1978

• movie

  • Curse Of The Pink Panther

    (Inspector Clouseau is missing and the Pink Panther (David...)

    1983
  • Revenge Of the Pink Panther

    (Peter Sellers, in his fifth appearance as the ever-bungli...)

    1978
  • Son Of The Pink Panther

    (Blake Edwards directs this romantic high-adventure that h...)

    1993
  • Peter & Paul

    (Peter & Paul DVD: Anthony Hopkins, Robert Foxworth, Eddie...)

    1981
  • King Solomon's Mines

    (Fortune hunter Allan Quatermain teams up with a resourcef...)

    1985
  • Trail of the Pink Panther

    (This tribute to the late Peter Sellers contains unused sc...)

    1982
  • The Pink Panther Strikes Again

    (After escaping from an insane asylum, the hilariously cra...)

    1976
  • The Phantom of the Opera

    (When the star of a London Opera house (Heather Sears) is ...)

    1962
  • Return Of the Pink Panther

    (Peter Sellers repeats his classic role as the bumbling Fr...)

    1975
  • Count Dracula

    (Cult director Jess Franco and screen legend Christopher L...)

    1970
  • A Shot in the Dark

    (Get ready for a riotous adventure as Peter Sellers return...)

    1964
  • Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy 2

    (Kriemhild exacts revenge for the death of Siegfried in th...)

    1966
  • Mysterious Island

    (The fantastic Captain Nemo once again inspires the spirit...)

    1961
  • The Face Of Eve 1968

Views

Quotations: "You know, I always do my best, no matter the quality of the film."

"America would not let me in. I was suspected of being a fellow traveller, a Communist sympathiser. Everybody had Communist leanings. But I was not a lover of Communist regimes. And I admired America greatly, yet for many years I was not allowed in."

"It was a godsend when I was offered the part. But it did become a double-edged sword as people started to associate me with Dreyfus. I loved playing the part of a blabbering lunatic of a police inspector. I think people like to see the police in such trouble; they enjoy seeing the inspector reduced to an utter, twitching wreck."

Interests

• books

Connections

Herbert Lom's first marriage, to the film distributor Dina Schea, with whom he had two sons, Alec and Nicholas, was dissolved in 1979. He also had a daughter Josephine with the potter Brigitta Appleby. A second marriage, to the skincare specialist Eve Lacik, was dissolved in 1990.

Father:

Karl Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru

Mother:

Olga Gottlieb

ex-wife:

Dina Schea

Son:

Alec Lom

Son:

Nicholas Lom

Daughter:

Josephine Lom

ex-wife:

Eve Lacik

companion:

Brigitte Appleby

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998