Peter Arne (born Peter Arne Albrecht, September 29, 1920 - August 1, 1983), was a British character actor best known for various performances in British film and television, including supporting roles in the television series The Avengers as well as villains in Blake Edwards' Pink Panther series. He was murdered in 1983, the probable perpetrator being found drowned several days later.
Arne was born in Kuala Lumpur, British Malaya, to a Swiss-French mother and American father, and gained his early acting experience in British provincial repertory. In 1953, the New Lindsey Theatre Club performed his play No Stranger. From the mid-1950s onward, he developed a successful career playing a broad range of supporting roles in both film and television, though with a specialisation in playing unsmiling villains such as German officers. In addition to acting, he ran his own antiques business.
In 1983 he was cast as the character "Range" in the Doctor Who television serial "Frontios". On August 1, 1983, shortly after he returned to his Knightsbridge apartment after a costume fitting, neighbors heard an argument and he was subsequently found bludgeoned to death with a log and a stool. Police issued a Photofit image of a man seen loitering and eating a jar of honey nearby, and four days later, the body of a man matching this description, Giuseppe Perusi, a schoolteacher from Verona, was found in the Thames at Wandsworth, and his bloodstained clothes upstream at Putney. Perusi had been living in a local park and been given food by Arne.
Westminster Coroner's Court recorded a verdict of unlawful killing for Arne's death, and one that Perusi had killed himself. The blood on Perusi's clothing matching Arne's, the police concluded that he had murdered Arne then committed suicide. At the hearing, it was revealed that Arne habitually solicited vagrant men for sex, but the reason for the violent argument that led to Arne's death remains unknown.
