Peter Lorre

Trivia

• According to Vincent Price, when he and Peter Lorre went to view Bela Lugosi's body during Bela's funeral, Lorre, upon seeing Lugosi dressed in his famous Dracula cape, quipped, "Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart just in case?"
• Was a favorite characterization for the famed Warner Bros. cartoonists, as he tangled several times with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. He was also portrayed as a fish in a Dr. Seuss Warner Bros. cartoon, Horton Hatches the Egg (1942).
• Was the very first James Bond villain; he played Le Chiffre in a 1954 version of Casino Royale on the TV show "Climax!" (1954).
• His image from M (1931) was unwittingly used on the German poster for the anti-semitic propaganda film, Der ewige Jude (1940), as an example of a typical Jew.
• Interred at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery (now called Hollywood Forever), Hollywood, California, USA, in the Cathedral Mausoleum.
• Spike Jones had a hit record with his wacky cover version of "My Old Flame" with voice actor Paul Frees doing a Lorre impression for the vocal. When Lorre appeared on Jones' radio show he had to learn the "Paul Frees" way of being Peter Lorre, as Peter himself was not quite the madman that Paul had made him out to be. Also imitated by Mel Blanc in a handful of Warner Bros. cartoons, and the vocal inspiration for the character Flat Top in "The Dick Tracy Show" (1961).
• About 1977, his daughter Catharine Lorre was almost abducted in Los Angeles by the serial killers known as the Hillside Stranglers. She was stopped by Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were impersonating policemen. When they realized she was Lorre's daughter, they let her go because the actor was famous for playing a serial killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931). Catharine Lorre didn't realize that they were killers until after they were arrested.
• In the early 1990s, his famous accent was parodied yet again in the cartoon show "Mega Man" (1995) as the robot henchman Cutman (possibly a wordplay on Sydney Greenstreet's Gutman in The Maltese Falcon (1941)).
• During the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of Communist infiltration of Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, Lorre was interviewed by investigators and asked to name anyone suspicious he had met since coming to the US. He responded by giving them a list of everyone he knew.
• As a young man in Vienna, he was a student of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.