Robert Clary, last of the stars of 1960s WW2 sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, dies at 96
- Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during WW2, opened up about years of horror at Nazi hands in a 1985 documentary
- After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary’s TV work included the soap operas The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives and The Bold and the Beautiful
Robert Clary, a French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during the second world war 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 on Wednesday of natural causes at his home in Beverly Hills, his niece Brenda Hancock said on 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.”
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. Clary sported a beret and a sardonic smile as Corporal 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.
Clary began his career as a nightclub singer and appeared on stage in musicals including Irma La Douce and Cabaret. After Hogan’s Heroes, Clary’s television work included the soap operas The Young and the Restless, Days of Our Lives and The Bold and the Beautiful.
He considered musical theatre the highlight of his career. “I loved to go to the theatre at quarter of eight, put the stage make-up on and entertain,” he said in a 2014 interview.