Robert Clary Dies: Holocaust Survivor & Actor Best Known As Corporal LeBeau On ‘Hogan’s Heroes Was 96
Robert Clary, who played Corporal LeBeau on the long-running World War II comedy Hogan’s Heroes, has died. He was 96.
The news was confirmed by Deadline’s sister publication The Hollywood Reporter, which cited his granddaughter Kim Wright.
Clary was seen by generations on the CBS show, which was set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. His Corporal LeBeau was a French POW and a member of an Allied sabotage unit operating inside the camp. Not only did Hogan’s Heroes have a long run from 1965-1971, but it played endlessly thereafter in syndication.
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Clary was one of the last two surviving members of the show’s principal cast, the other being Kenneth Washington, who played Sergeant Richard Baker in the show’s final season.
He was also a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in Paris in 1926 as the youngest of 14 children in a Jewish family, he was sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Ottmuth in Poland in 1942. Clary had sung on the radio before his imprisonment and, after he was transferred to Germany’s notorious Buchenwald camp, he sang to an audience of SS soldiers every other Sunday.
“Singing, entertaining, and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he later recalled. “I was very immature and young and not really fully realizing what situation I was involved with … I don’t know if I would have survived if I really knew that.”
A dozen members of Clary’s family were sent to Auschwitz and died during the war, including his parents. He was liberated from Buchenwald on April, 1945 and subsequently learned that three of his siblings had remained in occupied France and survived.
Asked years later in a Television Academy Foundation interview if he brought any of those experiences with him to Hogan’s Heroes Clary answered, “No, because it was completely different. If I wanted to bring [to my] character what it was like it would have been desperate.”
He was also careful to distinguish between the show’s setting and his own experiences as a Jew interned at Nazi concentration camps. “Stalag 13 is not a concentration camp. It’s a POW camp, and that’s a world of difference. You never heard of a prisoner of war being gassed or hanged.”
After the war, Clary returned to singing, and had some success in both France and the United States. He moved stateside in 1949 where he befriended singer Edie Cantor, later marrying Cantor’s daughter Natalie Cantor Metzger.
He began appearing on shows such as The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Martha Raye Show and on Broadway.
After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary appeared on a number of soaps, including Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful.
Clary appeared in the 1975 film The Hindenburg, which traced a fictional plot to blow up the German airship. He played Joseph Späh, a real-life passenger on the airship’s final voyage.
Clary spent his later years touring Canada and the United States and speaking about the Holocaust.
Watch Robert Clary’s Television Academy Foundation interview below.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=D1-lyAQOmKw%3Fstart%3D2107%26%23038%3Bfeature%3Doembed
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