Lom’s first major Hollywood success was Jules Dassin’s noir masterpiece “Night and the City” (1950), in which he played a chilling but remorseful gangster.īut he flourished in comedy as well, notably alongside Sellers and Alec Guinness in “The Ladykillers” (1955) and later as the twitchy, long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus, who is eventually driven insane by Sellers’s bumbling Inspector Clouseau. From the outset he was able to avoid being typecast as the lecherous but irresistible villain, unlike many other European actors who went to Hollywood in the 1940s. He began his English-speaking acting career at the Old Vic and other stage companies before landing some impressive film roles, thanks to an appealingly exotic accent and a sultry gaze.
His parents survived and later joined him in London, but his girlfriend died in a concentration camp. 11.) He became a theater actor and made one movie in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to London in 1939, just before the Nazis invaded (and shedding about 40 letters from his name along the way). (Various sources give his date of birth as Jan.
He was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru in 1917 to upper-class parents in Prague. In a career of more than five decades he appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows. His deep-set, mesmerizing eyes made him the perfect villain in a series of minor films in the early 1940s, and he went on to excel after World War II and in the 1950s and ’60s in small roles in a variety of genres.
Lom gained more attention as a reliable character actor than as a suave leading man, although he was both. His son Alec confirmed his death, The Associated Press reported. Herbert Lom, the versatile Czech-born actor who could play Napoleon Bonaparte or a witch hunter with equal aplomb but who was perhaps best known as Peter Sellers’s frustrated boss in the Pink Panther franchise, died on Thursday at his home in London.
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