From The Hollywood Reporter, November 16:
Robert Clary, Corporal LeBeau on ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ Dies at 96
The French actor and singer spent 31 months in a concentration camp but said he had no reservations about starring in a TV comedy about the Nazis.
Robert Clary, the French actor, singer and Holocaust survivor who portrayed Corporal LeBeau on the World War II-set sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, has died. He was 96.
Clary, who was mentored by famed entertainer Eddie Cantor and married one of his five daughters, died Wednesday morning at his home in Los Angeles, his granddaughter Kim Wright told The Hollywood Reporter.
CBS’ Hogan’s Heroes, which aired over six seasons from September 1965 to April 1971, starred Bob Crane as Colonel Robert E. Hogan, an American who led an international group of Allied prisoners of war in a covert operation to defeat the Nazis from inside the Luft Stalag 13 camp.
As the patriotic Cpl. Louis LeBeau, the 5-foot-1 Clary hid in small spaces, dreamed about girls, got along great with the guard dogs and used his expert culinary skills to help the befuddled Nazi Colonel Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) get out of trouble with his superiors.....
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As noted in the introduction to last July's "They Loved Me in Buchenwald: A tribute to Robert Clary, the French American actor who survived the Holocaust to take Hollywood by storm"
This story was published as a Bastille Day homage but more than that I think it's just wild that a concentration camp survivor ended up on a television show whose entire premise was mocking Nazis. You go, LeBeau!
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He did a lot more than Hogan's Heroes.
