Returning to civilian life in 1947, he started an acting career with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, then switched to films, becoming a publicist, first with J. Arthur Rank, then with Sir Alexander Korda and later with David O. Selznick for whom he worked on The Third Man (1949) in Vienna, and then on Terminal Station (1953) in Rome (released in the U.S. as Indiscretion of an American Wife).
[1] In 1956, he emigrated to the U.S. and first joined Tiffany & Company as a salesman, then left in 1963 to work in the Civil Rights Movement in the south with his good friend, actress Madeleine Sherwood.
[1] Returning to New York, he made a succession of gay erotic shorts culminating with Hot Pants, which won a first prize in 1971 at the Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam.
This led to a suggestion from producer Jack Deveau to select eight movies to be released commercially as The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome.
These shorts opened to critical acclaim at Lincoln Center in NYC, and later ran successfully in most large cities across the U.S. [citation needed] In 1974, de Rome went to Paris to make his first full-length feature entitled Adam & Yves, which was followed in 1976 by The Destroying Angel, an exercise in gay horror, supposedly based on Edgar Allan Poe, and using a title similar to Exterminating Angel (1962) by Luis Buñuel.