Andrew “Bundy” Lorre looked a great deal like his famous brother. Often told that he also talked just like Peter Lorre, he would reply, “Yes, but he is getting paid for it.” Circa 1931.

Peter Lorre and brother Francis Lorant, who later emigrated to Australia, lunching in Berlin, 1932. Lorre’s head is shaved for his role as a humpbacked drug dealer in Der weisse Dämon (The White Demon).

Celia Lovsky, circa 1925. Lovsky was already well established on the Vienna and Berlin stages when Lorre met her in 1929. He was mesmerized by her beauty, she by his talent.

Celia Lovsky, circa 1927. Peter Lorre told friends he didn’t know how he attracted such beautiful women. Some female admirers found his menacing and mysterious screen image appealing. His wives, however, shared something else in common – an unqualified belief in his talent.

On a winter holiday in the Black Forest of southwestern Germany, December, 1929. Peter proposed to Celia at Christmas that year.

Peter and Celia motor-boating on der Wannsee, a popular area for swimming and boating in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Taken in 1932.

After Peter and Celia divorced, she was seldom without one or more cats. When I knew her, she had four felines, all tabbies and all very spoiled. Here she is at a petting zoo with a tiger cub in her lap. Berlin, circa 1932.

Peter Lorre and Paul Falkenberg in a Paris editing room, 1933. Falkenberg, who edited M (1931), became a good friend of Lorre’s, even lending him money to take a cure for his drug addiction.

Peter Lorre, as the angelically simple “Moritz Steifel” in Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring’s Awakening), resists the sexual overtures of the nymphomanical Ilse (Lotte Lenja), Volksbühne, Theater am Bülowplatz, Berlin, October 1929. Taken by photographer Lotte Jacobi.

Kurt Gerron plays the shady profiteer “Camillioni” to Peter Lorre as the corrupt Vienna press czar “Barkassy” in Karl Kraus’ Die Unüberwindlichen (The Unconquerable, October 1929). At the Volksbühne, Theater am Bülowplatz, Berlin.

Otto Wallburg and Peter Lorre (as “Bach”, editor of The People’s Voice) in Carl Sternheim’s comedy Der Kandidat (The Candidate), Deutsches Kammerspiele, Berlin, January 1930. Said theater critic Fritz Engel in the Berliner Tageblatt: “He has a personal enchantment, not one of beauty; one is strongly moved and cannot pull himself away from Lorre.”

Heinz Rühmann and Hilde Körbe opposite Peter Lorre, as “Wasja”, a fanatical member of the League of Communist Youth, in Valentine Katayev’s Die Quadratur des Kreises (Squaring the Circle). The satire, set against Russia’s housing shortage, premiered at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin, in December 1930.

Whether distancing himself from a character or absorbing himself in a role, Lorre labeled himself a “face-maker.” As Vincent Price said, “It was his definition of acting.” Lorre first played the funnyman (“Pipi the Clown”) in Der Dompteur (The Lion Tamer) on the stage of Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in March 1931, with Carola Neher and Fritz Kampers.

Director Tay Garnett felt that Lorre called himself a “face-maker” because he wanted no one to know how seriously he took his art. Once again, as “the Pawnbroker” in Georg Kaiser’s Nebeneinander (Side by Side, September 1931), his facial expressions gave, according to one reviewer, “good insight into one driven by demons.” With Ilse Fürstenberg.