It's a date that his daughter the model actress and author Isabella

It's a date that his daughter, the model, actress and author Isabella Rossellini, is determined will be remembered. "I had to be a villain enough for a child, with the clear perception of childhood, to dislike me, and yet for a grown-up to see nothing out of the ordinary in me at all."'The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre' by Stephen Youngkin, is published by The University Press of Kentucky. My English is not good enough for me to know," he replies.Here, as always in his best roles, there is a strange ambivalence about his character He evokes pity, revulsion and humour at the same time The effect, of course, was quite deliberate. "Are you all right?" he is asked as he is sent tumbling in the snow "You had better ask my nurse.

Lorre hardly knew any English when he played the role, but he still delivers his lines with intelligence, grace and malevolence. He was - as his wife Celia Lovsky put it - "happily unhappy". "Yes, he was pigeonholed and unhappy at being typecast, but he was having a great time," says Youngkin.His genius is summed up in his first English-language film, Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Yes, the studio work soon grew numbing and repetitive, but he enjoyed the celebrity. "For those who knew Lorre well, the letter 'M' on his back stood for morphine as well as murderer," Youngkin writes.For all his regrets about not realising his potential as a stage actor, it was clear that much about Hollywood appealed to Lorre. Youngkin's book traces Lorre's morphine addiction back to the mid-1920s, when he spent several months in hospital, suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis. Had he stayed, his prospects would have been grim in the extreme.

One of the most chilling passages in Youngkin's biography explains how scenes of Lorre in M were eventually used in Fritz Hippler's Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940).And, given his drug dependency, it is questionable whether he would have had the stamina to take on really challenging work on stage or screen, wherever he had been based. In The Lost One (1951), his only feature as a director, he played a guilt-ridden Nazi scientist. Many attributed the film's box-office failure to the fact that it broached subjects too dark and provocative for post-war German audiences to accept.Then again, if Lorre had pursued his career in Europe, making brooding art-house movies and appearing on stage, he almost certainly wouldn't have the iconic status he enjoys today No one can blame him for heading to Hollywood As a Jew, he wasn't going to stay around in Nazi Germany. When he did briefly return to Germany after the war, he showed he had the potential to become a great film-maker. "In the wake of M, Lorre watched the 'lively,' naive,' 'melancholy,' 'explosive,' 'carefree' personality that had found expression on stage slip from public view.

The mantle of screen villainy concealed it," Stephen Youngkin writes in The Lost One, his new biography of Lorre.How, with such supporters behind him, did his career take so many wayward turns? Instead of playing eccentrics in B-movies, Lorre could have been a pivotal figure in the Berliner Ensemble, continuing his working relationship with Brecht. John Huston claimed that "the flight of his talent was just unlimited".Survey his career, though, and for all the memorable movies in which he appeared, there is a sense of under-achievement and anti-climax. Bertolt Brecht revered Lorre and regarded him as one of the most distinctive actors of his generation. Alfred Hitchcock, who cast him in two movies, found him (in the words of Hitchcock's biographer, John Russell Taylor) "wild and weird and fascinating to work with" Charlie Chaplin thought Lorre a genius. When he was studying a part, he told journalists, he became so absorbed that he was in a fever pitch. "Yet this does not stop me from from really feeling that we actors are a silly lot."Yet others took him very seriously indeed. After he played Beckert, he told a British journalist, he could not enter a restaurant without women "giving him one look and wondering whether to marry him or call the police." Fans - to his bafflement - regarded him as a source of erotic fascination.Lorre could never take his profession altogether seriously He called acting "making faces".

"And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children."It's an extraordinary piece of acting, ferocious but controlled, that makes audiences feel pity for Beckert just when their revulsion ought to be at its height Lorre's virtuosity is not in doubt. His misfortune, once he decamped to Hollywood, was that the qualities that had made him so utterly distinctive as Beckert were too often mobilised for cheap shock effects.Right from the outset, Lorre was philosophical and wryly self-mocking about the notoriety that M brought him. With those huge, frightened eyes, Beckert pleads for his life. Clammy, hysterical, he falls to his knees, whimpering "I can't help it." Suddenly summoning an unexpected articulacy, he bemoans the curse he is under as he runs the streets.