I came to Berlin with ten borrowed marks in my pocket, and I went to the theater. The manager told me to come in, because he said I didn't look like an actor. He sent me over to see Brecht. We talked for about half an hour and it was as if we had known each other for twenty years. "You're not going to get that part," he told me. I felt terrible. It was very Brechtian, really, because he waited a moment and then said: "You're going to play the lead in another play I

have." Deep down in my heart, you see, I'm a Cinderella.

   Peter Lorre, quoted in “Newsweek”

                           

Mr. Lorre, with every physical handicap, can convince you of the goodness, the starved tenderness, of his vice-entangled souls. Those marbly pupils in the pasty spherical face are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can see laid flat on the slide the entangled mind of a man: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair jumping out at you from the jelly.

   Graham Greene, in a review of “Mad Love”

Character actors were well experienced on the stage and they were tremendously valuable in every scene. They made all the difference. You look back on some of those movies Peter Lorre made...imagine putting somebody else in those roles--there would be nothing there! He was a guy you could put in a Simonize [floor wax] commercial and make it a classic. You just can't get that anymore. An actor can have talent, but if he hasn't done the work, he's not going to

be able to do what a guy like Peter Lorre did.

   Rip Torn, quoted in “Actors on Acting”

Peter carried his personal gentleness into his characterizations, and this was a great part of his magic.

   Charles Bennett, in “Close-Ups: The Movie Star Book”

Lorre had a beauty when he was thin that he lost when he ballooned up and became a caricature. If you see him in one of his thin roles, you're amazed at what an elegant creature he is.

  Pauline Kael, quoted in Aljean Harmetz’s “Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of

‘Casablanca’”

"I and my girl friends saw Peter Lorre last night," she said. "The movie actor. In person. He was buyin' a newspaper. He's c u t e."

"You're lucky," I told her. "You're really lucky. You know that?" She was really a moron. But what a dancer.

    J. D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”

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