Q)   Lorre is strongly stereotyped as a menace. How did you go about separating the man from his movies?

Lorre's female co-workers were clearly my most insightful informants. Women just seemed to connect with the inner man more than most of his male friends did. One of the telling things that one of them told me was that acting was Lorre's reality, that without it, there was nothing. Of course, this begs the question, how much of himself did he put into his roles.

One of the reasons I wanted to put the reader in touch with a more personal side of Peter Lorre -- his ambitions, expectations, how they were or were not met, how he achieved his acting style and method and so on -- was to enable him or her to better separate person from persona and get at the man. As a corollary, however, separating Lorre from himself was a far more delicate operation. As he grew older and lost touch with his own past, he threw up defenses that put a good public face on some of his private defeats. He not only embellished and exaggerated to tell a better story, but to reinvent himself. When you unravel some of the tales and compare the various versions he told to interviewers and friends at different times of his life, you begin to see patterns.

I think one of the most interesting and surprising things that came into focus was a man who wanted people to know, not who he really was, but who he really wanted to be. To people who didn't know better or weren't familiar with his real life history, he told some outrageous stories.

That aside, Lorre saw Brecht as one of the two most important writers in the 20th century, the other being James Joyce. This was the pivotal relationship in his life. He not only referred to Brecht as his best friend, but as himself as one of Brecht's actors. Without understanding Brecht, you can't understand Lorre. Some people have found Brechtian elements in Lorre's acting style. Well, I guess you can find anything if you look hard enough. It's a chicken and the egg argument.

When I first interviewed Brecht scholar Eric Bentley, I naturally asked about Brecht's influence on Lorre. He told me it was actually the other way around, that Brecht saw actors he liked, things they were doing -- in Lorre's case, the clashing of opposite characteristics, doing two things at once -- and formed those aspects into a new style of acting. Lorre was just doing what he had always been doing. It was an incredibly adaptable form. The same style could easily be plugged into different holes and given a new name, a new theoretical label. So, in a sense, Lorre's performances were Brechtian by default, before we -- or he -- knew the use of the word.