Peter Lorre

Laszlo Loewenstein was born in a corner of Austria-Hungary and drifted through central European theatre before Fritz Lang cast him in the role that would define an era of screen acting. In "M" (1931) he played a compulsive child murderer, and his final courtroom plea, a whimpering, sweating confession of a man enslaved by his own compulsions, remains one of the most disturbing and humane performances ever filmed. At a stroke he made the villain a psychological subject rather than a mustache-twirler.

Lorre was Jewish, and he fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, carrying with him a face and voice that Hollywood could not have invented: the round eyes, the plaintive purr, the suggestion of a wounded child inside a dangerous man. He learned English partly phonetically at first and turned his accent into an asset, an aura of exotic menace and pathos.

He worked both sides of his image. He was the courtly, faintly sinister detective in a popular run of "Mr. Moto" mysteries, and then he found his richest home in the Warner Bros. melodramas alongside Sydney Greenstreet, with whom he made nine films. As the perfumed, effete Joel Cairo in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and the doomed, sweating Ugarte in "Casablanca" (1942), he brought a nervous, insinuating energy that the sturdier stars around him lacked. He could be genuinely funny too, most memorably as the jittery henchman in the black comedy "Arsenic and Old Lace" (1944).

By the 1950s the parts thinned and the toll of years, weight, and morphine dependence showed. He returned to Germany once to direct and star in a somber film he cared deeply about, then came back to Hollywood to play affectionate self-parody in horror comedies alongside Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, gently sending up the menace he had pioneered.

He died of a stroke in 1964, only fifty-nine. Endlessly imitated, his voice a permanent fixture of cartoon and impression, Lorre risks being remembered as a novelty. The truth is larger: he was one of the first screen actors to make evil comprehensible, and pitiable, from the inside.