- Awards
- 21
He was cute as a button, excellent comic performer and dramatic actor. I'm watching him now in ARSENIC AND OLD LACE with Cary Grant.
Lorre was best buds with Humphrey Bogart, and starred in Fritz Lang's M as a serial killer, did a lot of MR. MOTO movies, THE MALTESE FALCON, CASABLANCA and many others.
He underwent a botched gallbladder surgery (use extra virgin olive oil instead!) and resultantly got hooked on morphine, blew up by 100 pounds, and had a stroke at age 59 and died, somehow appropriately, in 1964.
He exists in at least one imaginary movie in my head. Charles Addams' Homebodies cartoons, so popular in postwar era coffee table magazines, featured a Gomez and Morticia who resembled exactly Peter Lorre and Gloria Swanson (Addams even conceded the Swanson similarity). Obviously, the subsequent 1964/66 ADDAMS FAMILY television show was a hit, followed by those all-wrong/too-shrill '90s movies (where only Christina Ricci seemed sufficiently perverse to carry the films).
But nothing quite matched the dustily dour flavor of the original cartoons. And if only they'd put Swanson & Lorre together as the ultimate macabre mismatch. (Smells like 1959).
Lorre was best buds with Humphrey Bogart, and starred in Fritz Lang's M as a serial killer, did a lot of MR. MOTO movies, THE MALTESE FALCON, CASABLANCA and many others.
He underwent a botched gallbladder surgery (use extra virgin olive oil instead!) and resultantly got hooked on morphine, blew up by 100 pounds, and had a stroke at age 59 and died, somehow appropriately, in 1964.
He exists in at least one imaginary movie in my head. Charles Addams' Homebodies cartoons, so popular in postwar era coffee table magazines, featured a Gomez and Morticia who resembled exactly Peter Lorre and Gloria Swanson (Addams even conceded the Swanson similarity). Obviously, the subsequent 1964/66 ADDAMS FAMILY television show was a hit, followed by those all-wrong/too-shrill '90s movies (where only Christina Ricci seemed sufficiently perverse to carry the films).
But nothing quite matched the dustily dour flavor of the original cartoons. And if only they'd put Swanson & Lorre together as the ultimate macabre mismatch. (Smells like 1959).
