Herbert Lom

Herbert Lom (born 1917, Prague, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died September 27, 2012, London, England) was a Czech actor whose brooding looks and versatility allowed him a highly diverse screen career, though he was perhaps best known for his work in the Pink Panther film series.

Lom was born to a titled but fading aristocratic family. Sources differ on his birth date, giving either January 9 or September 11. He studied acting in Prague and performed onstage before immigrating in 1939 to England, where he attended the Embassy School of Acting. Following the outbreak of World War II, Lom took a position as a radio announcer for the BBC. He performed in two films before leaving Prague, and in 1942 he returned to the screen, playing Napoleon in The Young Mr. Pitt. He achieved greater recognition after appearing as a psychiatrist treating a repressed young amnesiac in the popular film The Seventh Veil (1945). In the 1950 noir Night and the City, Lom played a dangerous figure in the high-stakes underground world of professional wrestling.

Having proven himself as a character actor, romantic leading man, and cutthroat villain, Lom turned to comedy with The Ladykillers (1955). That film, which also starred Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, centres on a group of exaggeratedly sinister con men who use an elderly woman’s boarding house as the base for a robbery operation. Lom’s most-enduring comedic role, however, was that of Charles Dreyfus in the popular Pink Panther series. The twitchy commanding officer of Inspector Clouseau (played by Sellers), Dreyfus is repeatedly driven to murderous madness by Clouseau’s antics. The character first appeared in the second of the Pink Panther films, A Shot in the Dark (1964), and Lom reprised the part six more times between 1975 and 1993. His other notable films included Gambit (1966), Hopscotch (1980), and The Dead Zone (1983), a thriller based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.