Background
Born in Rozsahegy, Hungary, Lorre moved to Austria with his family as a child.
Born in Rozsahegy, Hungary, Lorre moved to Austria with his family as a child.
In 1921, eager for a theatrical career, he left home, but had to struggle until 1924, when he first obtained a walk-on part in a play.
In the interim, he had worked in a bank, established an amateur dramatic group, and studied psychiatry under both Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud. In 1929, having performed in Vienna, Breslau, and Zurich, Lorre first made his mark in Berlin in Die Pioniere von Ingolstadt.
After M, Lorre continued to work on the Berlin stage and in films until the rise of Nazism sent him back to Austria. Finding little work there or, subsequently, in Paris, Lorre went to England, where Alfred Hitchcock cast him as the villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Taking a Hollywood offer, Lorre made a great impression in his first American film, Mad Love, for which he emphasized his bulging eyes and prominent lips by shaving his head. Under contract to Fox in the late 1930s, he starred in a series of films as a Japanese detective, Mr. Moto. In 1942 he appeared with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon at Warner Brothers; both actors shared the screen with him again in several subsequent films.
After the war, with successes such as Casablanca', Arsenic and Old Lace, and The Beast with Five Fingers behind him, Lorre returned to Germany for his sole venture into film direction, Der Verlorene.
Working as coscreenwriter of the film, he starred in it as a Nazi scientist unable to control his homicidal tendencies. A serious illness in the early 1950s resulted in a considerable increase in Lorre’s weight and many of his last film were comedies in which he parodied the kind of role for which he had become famous