The Road To Wigan Pie

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

TV/Film versions of 19th Century Fictional Male Characters I Would Bang Into The 20th Century (In No Particular Order)

Happy Birthday Orson Welles: 6th May 1915 - 10th October 1985

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money. - Orson Welles

Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose from his chains and gone to sleep on the flower-bed. He is an active loafer, a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity. - Jean Cocteau

Orson was a superb dramatizer. As an actor, he was limited by his unique physical presence and that great booming conman’s voice. But when it came to storytelling, he was as exciting at a corner table, talking, as he was on the screen itself in a work all his own. - Gore Vidal