The Lost One – A Life of Peter Lorre

The Lost One:
A Life of
Peter Lorre

Peter Lorre's
Credits
(A Sample)

World/Inferno
Friendship
Society

Peter Lorre:
The Man,
The Actor

A journalist having lunch with Peter Lorre in 1935 noted that “His face is amazing in its changing lights and shadows. It is, in the space of a second or two, pleasant, amused, sinister and sad. Interesting, clever, kind and smiling, that face. . . obviously cannot be cataloged with any other face in the world.”

She also noticed that a haircut was Lorre’s only concession to makeup for the role he was to play. For Lorre, wigs and false noses did not make an actor.

“Acting comes from the inside. As you think, so you look, and so you appear,” he told a studio publicist (The Lost One, p.147).

In a 1936 series of portraits made during the filming of Nancy Steele Is Missing, a studio photographer captured Lorre’s outstanding ability to reveal psychological complexity as the varying emotions chase each other across those extraordinarily mobile features.

Conman, extortionist, and self-confessed murderer, Lorre’s “Professor Sturm” is hardly an appealing character. The killing he shrugs off with dismissive blandness; what else could he do? His only regret is that he got so little money out of his victim. All variations of the conman’s insinuating craftiness are subtly suggested in the portraits – even to the quite repellent.

But there are others where he surely has left “Professor Sturm” behind. With the prison bars as indistinct, looming shadows on the wall behind him, Lorre is seen in shots composed as squarely and compactly as an ancient Egyptian block statue, but with a weary, resigned sadness showing in both his expression and his body language with the slumped shoulders and clasped hands. In some shots the powerlessness of the prisoner is emphasized as the grid of the bars themselves is interposed solidly between viewer and subject.

The last portrait of the series stands out, transcending as it does the harsh reality of the prison surroundings. The iron bars dissolve into a luminous, insubstantial frame for the actor’s face, and the slightly tilted head, the unfocused gaze and dreamy, far-away expression lend a curious quality of vulnerable boyish innocence to the smooth, round face of the thirty-two year old Peter Lorre.

All photos from the collection of Karen Halstrøm.

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The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (2005) by Stephen Youngkin – now in its third printing and winner of the Rondo Award for "Best Book of 2005" – is available in bookstores everywhere, as well as these on-line merchants.