Celia Lovsky was the daughter of Bretislav Lvovsky, also known as Emil Pick, a minor Czech opera composer, born in Vienna in the late 19th century. She began her training at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts and Music in Vienna, where she honed her skills and quickly rose to become a rising star on the stage in both Vienna and Berlin by the late 1920s.
It was during this time that she met her future husband, Peter Lorre, a Jewish actor who was also a rising star in his own right. When Lorre fled Hitler's Berlin to Vienna in 1933, Lovsky accompanied him, and the couple eventually made their way to Paris and then London, where they married during the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934.
Lovsky appeared in the film in an uncredited role as a Russian aristocrat, and although she continued to accompany Lorre to Hollywood, she did not pursue a professional acting career while they were married. However, after their divorce in 1945, Lovsky began to appear in films and television shows, eventually becoming a character actress who appeared in over 40 films between 1947 and 1973, as well as over 200 television appearances between 1952 and 1974.
Due to her accent, Lovsky often played European-born characters, including dignified or aristocratic roles, and occasionally played Hispanics, a Native American, and even T'Pau, the ruler of the planet Vulcan on Amok Time in 1967. Despite her success, Lovsky remained a close friend of her former husband until his death in 1964 at the age of 59, and she passed away in 1979 at the age of 82 due to natural causes.
