Screenwriter Walter Reisch, Lorre's good friend and co-worker on F.P.1 antwortet nicht (Floating Platform 1 Doesn't Answer, 1932), said that ping-pong partner Conrad Veidt was one foot taller than Lorre, which would make the actor five foot, three inches (TLO, pg 74). It is likely, however, that Reisch rounded off the height difference for the sake of a good story.

On immigration documents (Declaration of Intention, Alien Registration Form, and Certificate of Naturalization) and medical records during the 1930s and 1940s, Lorre's height is consistently given as five foot, five inches. (The only exception to this was that provided to the ship's officer of the Cunard White Star Liner Majestic on July 18, 1934. Lorre described himself as being five foot, eight inches -- which was clearly a fib [TLO, pg 98].)

Of course, this figure begs yet another question: Was his height actually measured or did he simply supply the numbers?

Trying to reference the actor's height against various co-workers is very difficult. What kind of shoes was Lorre wearing? Was he wearing lifts? Were his co-workers (including the five foot, eight inch Bogart) wearing lifts? Or his female co-stars wearing heels? How do camera angles, which can radically alter our spatial dimensions, figure in?

In the end, we're left with medical records, which are probably the most reliable source for physical measurements.

Admitted to a U.S. Public Service Hospital at Ft. Worth in 1947, Lorre underwent a physical examination that charted his height at five foot, five inches (TLO, pg 284).

Q) Was Peter Lorre Jewish?

Anonymous note recently sent to this website -- "Okay, I'm going out on a limb here but the impression I get is that to date I am the only person who's written in depth about Peter who has a single drop of Jewish blood. At least the names Youngkin, Cabana, Bigwood, Beyer, and Sennett sound pretty goyische to me. I think the European writers don't concentrate on Peter's Jewishness because they don't want to be taken for anti-Semites, and the American ones don't pay attention to it because it doesn't mean anything to them. Gentiles tend to think of Judaism as just another religion, not understanding that it goes way beyond that. I am frankly pissed that Youngkin never bothered to mention in any of his books what Peter's Hebrew name was, whether or not he had a bar mitzvah, whether or not any of his wives were Jewish, what discrimination if any he suffered personally, whether or not he helped any of his relatives escape the Holocaust, how many personal friends and relatives he lost and how he felt about it, what motivated him to make the mind-blowing gesture of returning to Germany after what had happened, why he was given a funeral in a temple but was cremated in violation of Mosaic law -- a million relevant questions that Youngkin either never bothered to find out but didn't feel was worth including in that trivia-packed 600+ page book."

Before collecting my thoughts about Peter Lorre's religious convictions, I telephoned one of his oldest friends, who is Jewish. He laughed when I raised the subject and said that "Peter didn't have a religious bone in his body." Other friends and family members bore this out. Lorre neither hid his Jewishness nor wore it on his sleeve -- and people who did were often the victims of his rapier wit.

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