Czech-born film star Herbert Lom, best known as the deranged Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther comedies, has died, according to British media. He was 95.
His agent was not immediately able to confirm the reports that Lom died peacefully in his sleep on Thursday. The agent didn't say where, but Lom had been based in London.
Born into a poor aristocratic family in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1917, he shortened his complicated last name to Lom and appeared in a handful of locally made movies. He emigrated to Britain before the outbreak of the Second World War and made his home there.
He built a career that spanned over 100 films and included more than its fair share of villains.
"In English eyes, all foreigners are sinister," he was quoted as saying resignedly in 1991.
He portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte twice, including in War and Peace in 1956 alongside Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, and the King of Siam in the first London production of the stage musical The King and I in 1953.
Two years later he collaborated with Peter Sellers in the dark comedy The Ladykillers, and they would work together again in the 1960s and 1970s on the Pink Panther series.
In them, Lom played the increasingly crazed Dreyfus alongside Seller's hapless Inspector Clouseau, and the success of his character owed much to Lom's improvisations.
In an interview with the Independent newspaper in 2004, Lom recalled that it was he who invented Dreyfus's nervous twitch that became his trademark gesture.
"I started winking out of nervousness, and couldn't stop," he said. "It wasn't in the script but (director) Blake Edwards loved it."
