Posted on 11/17/2022 11:05:41 AM PST by mgstarr
Robert Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II who played a feisty prisoner of war in the improbable 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” has died. He was 96.
Clary died during the night Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Beverly Hills, niece Brenda Hancock said Thursday.
“He never let those horrors defeat him," Hancock said of Clary's wartime experiences as a youth. “He never let them take the joy out of his life. He tried to spread that joy to others through his singing and his dancing and his painting.”
When he recounted his life to students, he told them, “Don't ever hate,” Hancock said. “He didn't let hate overcome the beauty in this world.”
“Hogan’s Heroes,” in which Allied soldiers in a POW camp bested their clownish German army captors with espionage schemes, played the war strictly for laughs during its 1965-71 run. The 5-foot-1 Clary sported a beret and a sardonic smile as Cpl. Louis LeBeau.
Clary was the last surviving original star of the sitcom that included Bob Crane, Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon as the prisoners. Werner Klemperer and John Banner, who played their captors, both were European Jews who fled Nazi persecution before the war.
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Very minor clarification: It is in the city of Scottsdale, not Phoenix.
RIP. Cpl. LeBeau was a part of my childhood afternoons.
‘Salut, Monsieur Clary!’ Sad to hear he’s gone. Loved that show. I rarely saw it when it was originally aired, as I was very young. My mother didn’t want me watching any shows about the war. She served as a civilian employee of the RCN in Ottawa during the war.
As a HS student in the late ‘70s, I watched reruns after school at 4:30PM, along with ‘Gilligan’s Island’ reruns at 5:00PM. Excellent shows. What passes for ‘comedy’ is generally nothing but attacks on conservatives and families.
Thank you, Mr. Clary, for your acting in that show.
The show didn’t get a proper ending, so it just ended on a regular one of their capers. The camp didn’t really need to be liberated anyway, since the prisoners ran the place.
May he rest in peace.
Hate to here this. I believe he survived a concentration camp as well.
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