The soft-spoken, bug-eyed figure behind Boo Berry, Ren from Ren and Stimpy and countless Looney Tunes gags is based on a real man. This episode looks past the caricature at Peter Lorre, born Laszlo Lowenstein in 1904 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who lost his mother at four, moved to Vienna in 1913, trained with a puppeteer, and worked in Weimar-era Berlin with Bertolt Brecht before Fritz Lang cast him without a screen test as the child killer in M.

We follow his flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, learning his lines phonetically for Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hollywood typecasting from Mad Love to the Mr. Moto series, and the boycott Japanese goods badge he wore to a studio lunch. Then the Warner Bros. years with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, the gray-listing over his friendship with Brecht, his 1947 HUAC testimony and 1949 bankruptcy, the rejected German film Der Verlorene, morphine addiction, Roger Corman horror films, and his death at 59 in 1964.

• How Weimar avant-garde theater and Fritz Lang’s M invented modern psychological horror
• Why a language barrier accidentally created Lorre’s terrifying on-screen stare
• The double-take job and John Huston’s view of Lorre’s braininess and innocence
• Playing Le Chiffre in a 1954 TV Casino Royale, the first on-screen James Bond villain
• The night in 1977 when the Hillside Stranglers released his daughter Catherine after learning who her father was