Emeritus Academy Lecture Series: Helen Fehervary

Born László Löwenstein in Hungary in 1904, Lorre had his Hollywood film persona embody an uncanny strangeness: a soft, disarming, voice; an unidentifiable foreign accent; a face that expressed emotions from menacing shrewdness to sudden disquiet and alarm; a pliant body that executed quick transitions from stealth to shrinking cowardice. If Lorre lives on in the popular imagination as the sinister alien, his significance for Brecht, on which this paper focuses, was entirely different. Based on Lorre’s unique gestic speech and physical stage presence, the playwright and director Brecht considered him to be the greatest interpreter of epic theater, an opinion that only grew stronger during their shared exile in Los Angeles in the 1940s. As for Lorre, two years before his death in 1964 he told an interviewer from Newsweek: “The only compliment I’ve ever had about my acting that meant anything to me was from Brecht.” 

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