Cary Grant with Raymond Massey & Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, dir.Frank Capra) 

“All that anyone needs to imitate me is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice.”

-Peter Lorre 

“I was a murderer, but I was a matinee idol.”

-Peter Lorre, on his breakthrough role in M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang)

M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang) 

“I left Berlin three days before the Hitler regime commenced (1933), and I was happy to leave, as my nerves were on edge with the tenseness of the political situation all around. I have seen too many starving people in Germany, and starving people are crazy people, willing to clutch at any straw, to follow any leader. Politics in Germany is a vital personal concern. People who have been bosom friends for years do not speak to one another because of differences.”

-Peter Lorre, in a 1934 Chicago Tribune interview about his reasons for emigrating to the U.S.

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“My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely. When you do there’s the danger that the patron will leave the theatre feeling that you are so perfectly suited to the character he has just seen that he can’t imagine you in any other part.

…Mothers with children ran from me in the street. Terrible letters came to me. Letters came from strange people; people who I never believed lived in the world; depraved and disturbed minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic. A success can be too great, I tell you.”

-Peter Lorre, on his role in 1931’s M

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M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang) (via)

1-3: Fritz Lang (right) directs Peter Lorre (left) on the set of M (1931), 4: Production sketch by M art director Emil Hasler

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