First storming the screen as a child murderer in the 1931 thriller M, Peter Lorre played a deviant role that would come to define his acting career. The round-faced foreigner with a heavy accent was frequently cast as a shifty villain. As Lorre graduated to higher-profile films, the crimes he was cast to commit graduated with him. His greatest successes came as the antagonist Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and as the conniving gangster Ugarte in Casablanca.