One hundred and eleven years ago today, a little baby girl named Caecilie Lvovsky was born in Vienna.  It was 1897, and this child of the nineteenth century would live well into the 20th, and make a name for herself as a talented actress of stage, screen and television.  And most significantly, she presided over the koon-ut-kal-if-fee, and later the fight to the death, where a sexually-enraged Mr. Spock (caught in the the Vulcan equivalent of elephant musth) believed he had killed his Captain, and his friend.  Her stage name was Celia Lovsky.

On Feb. 9th here on Movie Morlocks, Jeff profiled prolific and fascinating actor Peter Lorre, and there is a fascinating shared history between Lovsky and Lorre.  After studying drama at the Royal Academy of Arts and Music in Vienna, the lovely Celia moved to Berlin, the European city where the arts ruled and every theatre and symphony hall fostered incredible talents, many of whom would become famous throughout the world   In Berlin, Celia, who had made a couple of movies already, met actor Peter Lorre, an up-and-coming thespian, and the two, attracted no doubt as much by love as by appreciation for each other’s prodigious talents, married in 1934.  Lovsky was several years older than Lorre, and a keen judge of potential.  She was credited with recommending Peter to director Fritz Lang, an introduction that would result in the role that jumpstarted his movie career, the eerie and haunted child killer in 1931’s M.  Celia had followed Peter out of Germany when he fled the Nazis, and it was in London where they actually married, where he was making The Man Who Knew Too Much for Alfred Hitchcock. 

Lorre and Lovsky moved to Hollywood in 1935, and though Celia was a talented actress in her own right, Lorre preferred that his wife not pursue her own acting career.  During the time that Lorre was establishing his varied career (as documented in Jeff’s article) through films like Mad Love, a string of Mr. Moto detective movies, and ever more prominent parts in major titles like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, Celia Lovsky played the dutiful wife.  Their marriage ended in March of 1945, and two months later Lorre married actress Kaaren Verne (and would marry again once more, too).  Now on her own in Hollywood, Celia Lovsky reactivated her own acting career, in a steady stream of supporting roles.  Her heavy European accent, which she never lost, may have cost her some roles, but it made her the perfect choice for others, as she appeared in movie after movie, starting in the later 1940s, as various characters of diverse ethnic backgrounds, where her unique and memorable speech patterns made her a reliable and popular character actress. 

Sometimes uncredited but always recognizable, Celia worked at all the studios in a wide variety of titles, including The Snake Pit, Captain Carey, U.S.A., Bright Leaf, Because You’re Mine, The Big Heat, Rhapsody, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain and many more.  In addition to her European-oriented roles, she also played Native Americans and Hispanics in Westerns several times, and of course beginning in the early 1950s was a frequent performer on many TV series.  Onscreen she received especially good notices for her role as Lon Chaney’s hearing-impaired mother in Man of a Thousand Faces in 1957, starring James Cagney. 

Beginning around the late 1950s, Celia concentrated on her television work, making memorable appearances in everything from The Twilight Zone to Bonanza to Dragnet to The Big Valley to The Flying Nun, to the role that would make her immortal, playing the Vulcan matriarch T’Pau in the original Star Trek second season opening episode "Amok Time" in 1967.  They may have worked on the show over forty years ago, but many actors discovered that a guest role on Star Trek is forever, and no doubt so did Celia Lovsky. 

Celia continued to work until the mid-1970s, and she died at the age of eighty-two in 1979.  Though, all told, she brought hundreds of characters to life during her long and varied acting career, she could have done a lot worse than being in the Trek Hall of Fame.  It's probably not a bad place to spend eternity, after all.