Actor, singer and Holocaust survivor Robert Clary, known for his role as Private LeBeau in the classic series ‘Guerra, Sombra and Água Fresca’, died this Wednesday (11/16), at his home in Los Angeles. He was 96 years old.
Clary was the last living member of the main cast of “Guerra, Sombra e Água Fresca,” an epoch-making series in the 1960s that ran for many years on Brazilian TV.
Robert Max Widerman was born on March 1, 1926 in Paris. He was the youngest of 14 children in an Orthodox Jewish family. At the age of 12, he started singing and performing. However, at the age of 16, he and his family were taken to be exterminated in Auschwitz.
“My mother said something memorable to me,” Clary told The Hollywood Reporter magazine in 2015. “She said, ‘Behave.’ She probably knew me as a brat. She said, ‘Behave. Do what they say.’ for you to do.'”
Clary’s parents were murdered that day in the gas chamber.
He survived because he sang with an accordionist before an audience of Nazi soldiers every Sunday. “Singing, having fun and being healthy at my age is why I survived,” he said.
Clary was incarcerated for a total of 31 months. During that time, you worked in a factory producing 4,000 wooden heels a day and had the identification “A-5714” tattooed on her left forearm. She was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
After being released, Clary returned to France in May 1945 and began singing in dance halls. She moved to Los Angeles in 1949 to record with Capitol Records. A year later, she appeared in a French comedy sketch on a CBS variety show hosted by Ed Wynn.
Clary also participated in films such as “The Men of the Desert” (1951) and “The Princess of Damascus” (1952), later he met the famous artist Eddie Cantor, who took him to New York to perform in clubs, where he captured the attention and was invited to make his Broadway debut, in the 1952 musical “New Faces”.
She sang “Lucky Pierre” and “I’m In Love With Miss Logan” in the musical, which also featured Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Ronny Graham, Alice Ghostley and Carol Lawrence and had sketches written by future director Mel Brooks. “New Faces” was filmed by Fox and shown in theaters in 1954.
The actor appeared again on Broadway in 1955 in the musical Seventh Heaven, with Gloria DeHaven, Ricardo Montalban and Bea Arthur. He also made appearances in the films “Love That Way” (1963) and the television show “Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater” (1965).
However, his deserved recognition came when he was cast in ˜Guerra, Sombra e Água Fresca’. Aired on CBS between 1965 and 1971, the series ran for six seasons and starred the actor as a French prisoner named Louis LeBeau.
The plot loosely inspired by the film “O Inferno Nº 17” (1953) follows a multinational group of prisoners of war, led by American Colonel Robert E. Hogan (Bob Crane), who take advantage of Nazi incompetence to collaborate with the resistance even at inside the prison, and ultimately also help its clumsy captors avoid being replaced by hardline officers.
Clary, who stood five feet tall, hid in confined spaces, dreamed of girls, got along with Nazi guard dogs, and used her cooking skills to help confused German Colonel Wilhelm Klink (Werner Klemperer) get rid of the problems with your superiors.
Speaking about her choice to star in a comedy series about prisoners of war, Clary said: “I had to explain [para judeus] that the series was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and while I didn’t mean to detract from what the soldiers went through with the Nazis, it was a night and day difference from what people faced in the camps of concentration. concentration camp,” he wrote in his memoir “From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes,” published in 2001.
His other acting credits include ‘Arnie’ (1972), ‘Fantasy Island’ (1978), ‘Secret Mission’ (1984), ‘General Hospital’ (1985) and the film ‘The Airship Hindenburg’ (1975). .
Clary also appeared in over 500 episodes of the soap opera ‘Days of Our Lives’ and another 43 episodes of ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’. His latest acting credit was voicing a character in the television production ‘Matisse & Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry’ (2001).
Off screen, she sang on several jazz albums alongside composers such as Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer. In addition, he also recorded the album ‘Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII’, together with his ‘Guerra, Sombra and Água Fresca’ castmates, Richard Dawson, Larry Hovis and Ivan Dixon.
Clary has also worked with the international human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and has lectured at universities across the country for over two decades. He was married for 32 years to Natalie Cantor, the second daughter of Eddie Cantor. She died in 1997.
For nearly four decades, Robert Clary has cited trauma to avoid talking about his experience of the Holocaust. But he recently changed his mind, citing the growing wave of denial.
“For 36 years I’ve had these experiences of war locked up inside me,” he once said. “But those who are trying to deny the Holocaust, my suffering and the suffering of millions of others have forced me to speak out.”
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Source: Terra
Jason Root is a writer at Gossipify, known for his in-depth coverage of famous people in entertainment, sports, and politics. He has a passion for uncovering the stories behind the headlines and bringing readers an inside look at the lives of the famous. He has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
