BFI Southbank has announced a season dedicated to one of the most nuanced and complex actors of his generation Peter Lorre.
Marking the fiftieth anniversary of his death, this five week retrospective from Tuesday 2 September – Tuesday 7 October will feature some of Lorre’s most celebrated roles.
Lorre was famed for playing sinister characters and even holds the prestigious position of being the first actor to ever portray a Bond villain, when he played Le Chiffre in a 1954 television adaptation of Casino Royale.
The season will showcase a number of Lorre’s villainous screen moments such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Crime and Punishment (1935), as well as his roles in some of the most iconic films of the golden age of Hollywood including Casablanca (1942) and The Maltese Falcon (1941).
The centrepiece of the season will be the film which made Lorre a star, Fritz Lang’s psychological thriller M (1931), re-released by the BFI in cinemas across the UK on September 5.
Born László Loewenstein in the small Austro-Hungarian town of Rószahegy (now in present day Slovakia), Lorre won critical acclaim for his theatre work with Bertolt Brecht and international fame beckoned after his first major film role as a compulsive child murderer in M.
The selection of twenty two films from his vast filmography being screened in the season shows how Lorre both exploited and subverted his image, revealing a versatility which stretched from comedy, drama and adventure to even a Fred Astaire musical.
Photo courtesy: BFI
