Born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru, Herbert Lom enjoyed a lucky acting career in his native Czechoslovakia, especially in theater. He made his cover debut in Zena Pod Krizem (1937) and made one more movie in Czechoslovakia in advance emigrating to England in 1938. He acted at The Practised Vic in London, volume other companies, in front of turning to British films, where his creditable looks, cultured accent and mannerisms, and fervent eyes got him cast in such ... unusual roles as Napoleon Bonaparte (in The Boyish Mr. Pitt) in between more anonymous parts. Lom's real breakthrough role was in Compton Bennett's 1946 psychological scenario The Seventh Veil, as Dr. Larsen, the psychiatrist treating neuroses of the pianist portrayed at near Ann Todd. Lom ascendancy keep become a sort of Eastern (or Midriff) European successor to Charles Boyer, but he was too good an actor to limit himself to maudlin parts; as contrasted with, he was more like a Czech Jean Gabin. Lom time played exceptionally motivated villains in the 1950s and '60s, most notably in Jules Dassin's Sunset and the Big apple (1950), in which he brought surprising humanity to the situation of a brutal, vengeful mugger, and Sidney Gilliat's National Confidential (1950). He reprised the role of Napoleon in Crowned head Vidor's sprawling 1956 in Britain artistry of In conflict and Peace, and was a memorably humane, fount-viva voce Captain Nemo in the Streak Harryhausen output of Mysterious Key (1961); he also played the crown lines in a 1962 production of The Phantom of the Opera, but Lom's most excellently talkie during this period -- in the face having some of his shortest shelter in good time dawdle -- was Anthony Mann's El Cid, in which he played the Muslim leader Ben Yussuf. He counter-balanced this insert with a newly revealed flair because comedy, utilized in the Pink Panther movies, starting with A Shot in the Dark, where his large-suffering bureau chief Dreyfus was forever dreading Inspector Clouseau's latest faux pas. He was also Simon Legree in the 1965 German musical work of Uncle Tom's Cabin (as Onkel Tom's H??tte).

During the late '60s and '70s, he began appearing in awe films of different types, following a path compare favourably with to that blazed by his British-born contemporary Michael Gough. He has kept his pointer in gentler and more complex roles, however, including that of the sardonically humorous Soviet office chief in Ronald Neame's Hopscotch (1980), and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983).