Actor Herbert Lom has died, aged 95.

Born Herbert Karel Angelo Kuchacevic¹ ze Schluderpacheru, Lom is, perhaps, best known to mainstream audiences as the psychotic Inspector Dreyfuss in several Pink Panther films, starting with 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, but he also had a long and distinguished career across the cult cinema world. Lom could be guaranteed to give a committed performance no matter what the film.

He made his on-screen debut in 1937 in Czech film Zena pod krízem, and would be typed as Euro-heavies and Nazis over the next decade or so, in films like Tomorrow We Live, The Dark Tower, Hotel Reserve, The Seventh Veil, Night Boat to Dublin, Appointment with Crime, Dual Alibi, Snowbound, Good Time Girl, Portrait from Life, The Golden Salamander, Night and the City, State Secret, The Black Rose, Cage of Gold, Hell is Sold Out, The Ringer, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, The Net, Rough Shoot and others.

In 1955, he was the most sinister of The Ladykillers, and a year later played Napoleon in War and Peace. In 1957’s classic Hell Drivers, he was a heroic character, and the rest of the decade was filled out with the likes of Chase a Crooked Shadow, Intent to Kill, Passport to Shame and Third Man on the Mountain.

In the early Sixties, he had roles in major movies like Spartacus, Mysterious Island and El Cid. He took the title role in Hammer’s unusually lacklustre remake of Phantom of the Opera in 1962, and was a star of TV series The Human Jungle before his first Pink Panther film.

Towards the end of the decade, he worked with Jess Franco on 99 Women and Count Dracula, and at the start of the 1970s, he made the notorious Mark of the Devil for Michael Armstrong and Dorian Gray for Massimo Dallamano.

The Seventies saw three more Pink Panther films (Lom also appeared in the post-Peter Sellers disasters Trail of the Pink Panther and Curse of the Pink Panther in the Eighties), alongside Murders in the Rue Morgue, Asylum, Dark Places, And Now the Screaming Starts, And Then There Were None, Hammer’s The Lady Vanishes, The Man with Bogart’s Face and Hopscotch.

In 1983, he appeared in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, and other work in the decade included Lace, King Solomon’s Mines, Dragonard, The Crystal Eye, Whoops Apocalypse, Masque of the Red Death, with The Pope Must Die and Son of the Pink Panther following in the 1990s before he retired from the screen.