Robert Clary (1926 - 2022)

[Zoneboy]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...es-1235263555/

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 convert 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.

Clary was the last surviving member of the show’s original principal cast.

Born Robert Max Widerman in Paris on March 1, 1926, Clary was the youngest of 14 children in a strict Orthodox Jewish family. At age 12, he began singing and performing; one day when he was 16, he and his family were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.

“My mother said the most remarkable thing,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Peter Flax in late 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they tell you to do.'”

Clary’s parents were murdered in the gas chamber that day.

At Buchenwald, Clary sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he told Flax.

Clary was incarcerated for 31 months (he worked in a factory making 4,000 wooden shoe heels each day) and tattooed with the identification “A-5714” on his left forearm. He was the only one of his captured family to make it out alive.

He chose not to talk about his Holocaust experience for almost four decades. “For 36 years I kept these experiences during the war locked up inside myself,” he once said. “But those who are attempting to deny the Holocaust, my suffering and the suffering of millions of others have forced me to speak out.”

Did Clary have any reservations about doing a comedy series dealing with Nazis and concentration camps?

“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote in his inspirational 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes.

After being liberated, Clary returned to France in May 1945 and sang in dance halls. He came to Los Angeles in 1949 to record for Capitol Records and a year later appeared in a French comedy skit on a CBS variety show hosted by vaudevillian Ed Wynn.

Clary appeared in such films as Ten Tall Men (1951) and Thief of Damascus (1952), then met Cantor, who took him to New York to perform at the tony La Vie en Rose club. He came to the attention of producer Leonard Sillman, who cast Clary in the Broadway musical revue New Faces of 1952.

He sang “Lucky Pierre” and “I’m In Love With Miss Logan” in the show, which also featured Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Ronny Graham, Alice Ghostley and Carol Lawrence and had sketches written by Mel Brooks. New Faces was filmed by Fox and played in movie theaters in 1954.

Clary then appeared again on Broadway in 1955 in the musical Seventh Heaven, which starred Gloria DeHaven, Ricardo Montalban and Bea Arthur.

The actor showed up in the Paris-set Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film A New Kind of Love (1963), and in the Robert Wise-directed The Hindenburg (1975), he portrayed a passenger (a circus acrobat) on the doomed airship’s final voyage.

Clary also worked on the daytime soap operas Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless (his character, Pierre Roulland, owned a restaurant/club in Genoa City, then was murdered) and The Bold and The Beautiful.

He sang on several jazz albums that featured the work of songwriters like Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. (Also a part of his discography: Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII, recorded with his castmates Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon.)

Clary worked closely with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaking at universities across the country for more than two decades.

An accomplished painter, Clary was married for 32 years to the late Natalie Cantor, the second daughter of Eddie Cantor. She died in 1997.

[Alan Brady's Hair]

He starred in what I think was the funniest Hogan's Heroes episode, LeBeau and the Little Old Lady. RIP.

[TVLegend]

RIP.

[Sgt. Saunders]

This is very sad news. Mr. Clary was a wonderful actor and singer. As a kid, I loved watching Mr. Clary as the spirited Pvt. Louis LeBeau on “Hogan’s Heroes” with my father and my brothers.

When I learned that Mr. Clary was a Holocaust survivor, I mentioned it to my father who had been an infantryman in North Africa and Europe during World War II. My father then told me how his regiment, part of the 36th Infantry Texas Division, had liberated and evacuated the survivors at Landsberg Prison in Bavaria in April of 1945. He told me that Landsberg Prison was affiliated with the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. My father told me that the sight of all those emaciated bodies, piled up like stacks of wood in the open freight train cars next to the prison was the worst thing he saw during the nearly two and a half years he was overseas.

Ironically, after the war ended in May of 1945, many of the convicted Nazi war criminals from the Nuremberg War Crime trials were later executed by the US Army at Landsberg Prison.

If you log onto YubeTube, there is an interview that Mr. Clary gave, recounting the last time he saw his mother before they were separated at a concentration camp. “Be a good boy,” she told him, Mr. Clary related as he welled up with tears many years later. Mrs. Clary and the rest of the Clary family were later murdered in one of the death camps. It was like watching the final scene in “Schindler’s List,” that interview with Mr. Clary was that emotionally moving.

Requiem aeternam, Mr. Clary.

[Dude111]

Very sad.....

[stevea]

RIP, RC! LeBeau, sure would have liked to taste your cooking!

[D-Dey]

Originally Posted by Zoneboy

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...es-1235263555/
He chose not to talk about his Holocaust experience for almost four decades. “For 36 years I kept these experiences during the war locked up inside myself,” he once said. “But those who are attempting to deny the Holocaust, my suffering and the suffering of millions of others have forced me to speak out.”

It should be noted that there were people denying the Holocaust before Hogan's Heroes even aired. But still it's sad that he's gone.

[Little_stinker]

He was the only person that I have ever heard who pronounced the colonel word the proper way.

[Ohio8]

[Yong Fang]

Clary is truly the last surviving cast member from the original cast but Kenneth Washington who played Sargeant Richard Baker in the last season, is still alive at the age of 76.

[MA]

IFC will be having a marathon of Hogan's Heroes on Wednesday from 6:30 AM until 1:00 PM.

[Alan Brady's Hair]

MeTV showcasing some LeBeau episodes this week:

November 21 (all ET)

10P | 9C - “Lebreau and the Little Old Lady" - LeBeau says that he keeps rendezvousing with a little old lady who is actually young and beautiful.
10:30P | 9:30C - “Gowns by Yvette” - Burkhalter's niece is getting married and by having LeBeau design her wedding gown, Hogan is going to contact an underground agent, and later free him after capture by the Gestapo.

November 22nd

10P | 9C - “Man in a Box” - Hogan is hot on the trail of capturing LeBeau, but not too quickly since he has a mission to complete.
10:30P | 9:30C - “Cuisine a la Stalag 13” - LeBeau wants to escape, leaving Stalag 13 without its resident chef.

November 23rd

10P | 9C - “The Scientist” - Corporal LeBeau pretends to be a visiting French scientist while Hogan smuggles out the real one.
10:30P | 9:30C - “The Gypsy” - LeBeau is passed off as a Gypsy fortune teller to help get a radar countermeasure device to London.

[Zebra 3]

Originally Posted by Alan Brady's Hair

MeTV showcasing some LeBeau episodes this week:

November 21 (all ET)

10P | 9C - “Lebreau and the Little Old Lady" - LeBeau says that he keeps rendezvousing with a little old lady who is actually young and beautiful.
10:30P | 9:30C - “Gowns by Yvette” - Burkhalter's niece is getting married and by having LeBeau design her wedding gown, Hogan is going to contact an underground agent, and later free him after capture by the Gestapo.

November 22nd

10P | 9C - “Man in a Box” - Hogan is hot on the trail of capturing LeBeau, but not too quickly since he has a mission to complete.
10:30P | 9:30C - “Cuisine a la Stalag 13” - LeBeau wants to escape, leaving Stalag 13 without its resident chef.

November 23rd

10P | 9C - “The Scientist” - Corporal LeBeau pretends to be a visiting French scientist while Hogan smuggles out the real one.
10:30P | 9:30C - “The Gypsy” - LeBeau is passed off as a Gypsy fortune teller to help get a radar countermeasure device to London.

I also recommend Art for Hogan's Sake (#2.16).