Happy Birthday Peter Lorre [László Löwenstein]: 26th June 1904 - 23rd March 1964
Lorre - perhaps it is a misfortune - can do almost anything. He is a genius who sometimes gets the finest effects independently of his director, but he is also a throroughly reliable repertory actor…I have a horrible fear that film directors will find it easier to follow in Hitchcock’s footsteps and provide Lorre with humorous character parts than discover stories to suit his powerful genius, his overpowering sense of spiritual corruption. He is an actor of great profundity in a superficial art. - Graham Greene writing in 1936
He was a delight to work with and a joy to have as a friend, as he possessed a rare talent for gaiety. There was not a pompous or even solemn bone in his body. - John Huston
Peter was a very cultured man, a very sensitive person, a very loveable man, and with a great sense of humour. - Robert Mamoulian.
He was a remarkable innovator…a man who built his part with little tricks that were almost indiscernible, with his eyes, his face, with his body, and with a little look at the right time, a little shrug of the shoulder. Each of these built a character and built up a love in the director for that person who’s thinking of things that he should be thinking of. - Frank Capra
I am less complicated than anyone I know. My interest and instincts, I am afraid, are strictly normal, but I have always had, even as a child, a fantastical absorption into getting into people’s character - in trying to unmask them and their motives. This, I suppose is what has interested me so much in playing pathological roles, but has not, I want to say emphatically, circumscribed my ambitions, for I want to play all kinds of parts. I don’t care whether it is tragedy or comedy if it is authentic portrayal of life. - Peter Lorre
