Trivia: Forceful African American leading man Ivan Dixon first commanded notice from theatergoers for his performance in the 1957 Broadway play The Cave Dwellers. He entered films as Sidney Poiter's double and stand-in with Something of Value (1957) and The Defiant Ones (1958), ultimately sharing scenes with Poitier in Porgy and Bess (1959) and Raisin in the Sun (1961). In 1964's Nothing But a Man, Dixon starred as Duff Anderson, an irresponsible Alabama railroad worker whose late-blooming maturity forms the nucleus of the film. Dixon's TV work includes the role of Kinchloe on the POW sitcom Hogan's Heroes and his Emmy-nominated starring role on the 1967 dramatic special The Private War of Olly Winter. In his later years, Ivan Dixon remained active as a director and a performer: he helmed the theatrical features Trouble Man (1972) and The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1992), such TV movies as Love is Not Enough and Percy and Thunder, and several episodes of the TV adventure series Hawaiian Heat (1984). Dixon died at age 76 in March 2008.

Trivia: Actor John Banner was forced out of his native Austria in 1938 when Hitler marched in. Though most familiar to filmgoers and TV viewers as a man of considerable heft, he was a trim 180 pounds when, while touring with an acting troupe in Switzerland, he found he couldn't return to Austria because he was Jewish. Banner came to America as a refugee; though unable to speak a word of English, he was almost immediately hired as emcee for a musical revue, From Vienna, for which he had to learn all his lines phonetically. Picking up the language rapidly, Banner was cast in several films of the 1940s, starting with Pacific Blackout. Because of his accent and Teutonic features, he most often played Nazi spies -- a grim task, in that Banner's entire family in Austria was wiped out in the concentration camps. Tipping the scales at 280 pounds in the 1950s, Banner worked steadily as a character man in films and on television; he can be seen as a variety of foreign-official types on such vintage TV series as The Adventures of Superman and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. In 1965, Banner was cast as Sgt. Schultz in the long-running wartime sitcom Hogan's Heroes. A far cry from the villainous Nazis he'd played in the 1940s, Schultz was a pixieish, lovable blimp of a man who'd rather have been working as a toymaker than spending the war guarding American POWS, and who, to protect his own skin, overlooked the irregularities occurring in Stalag 13 (which as every TV fan knows was Colonel Hogan's secret headquarters for American counterespionage) by bellowing "I know nothing! I see nothing! Nothing!" John Banner enjoyed playing Schultz, but bristled whenever accused of portraying a cuddly Nazi: "I see Schultz as the representative of some kind of goodness in every generation," the actor told TV Guide in 1967. As to the paradox of an Austrian Jew playing a representative of Hitler's Germany, Banner replied, "Who can play Nazis better than us Jews?" Or who could play them funnier than John Banner?

Trivia: Actor Werner Klemperer seemed destined for a career as a classical musician in his native Germany; his father was legendary orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer, and his mother was an opera singer. Otto Klemperer fled the Nazis in 1933 and secured a job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, then sent for his wife and children. Trained in piano, trumpet and violin, young Werner never lost his love of music, but decided in the early '40s to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. A naturalized American citizen, Klemperer worked in Maurice Evans' special services unit in World War II, which gave Werner invaluable training before all sorts of audiences. Completely bald in his mid 20s, Klemperer had little problem securing theatrical work as older continental types, yet he yearned to broaden his range. To do this, he completely surpressed his German accent, the better to play such all-American character roles as the timorous press agent in the 1957 Cary Grant film Kiss Them for Me (1957). The capture of fugitive Nazi official Adolph Eichmann in 1960 sparked a renewal of interest in war films, and soon Klemperer found himself playing Eichmann (whom he vaguely resembled) in the 1961 quickie Operation Eichmann. He also essayed a suitably slimy role as a former Nazi jurist on trial for war crimes in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg. Try though he might to break free of the stereotype, Klemperer was stuck in Teutonic roles, so he resigned himself to recultivating his German accent and worked steadily throughout the '60s. A low-comedy variation of Klemperer's standard character made him an international TV favorite: the actor played the heel-clicking, imperious and incredibly stupid Colonel Klink on the popular sitcom Hogan's Heroes from 1965 through 1970. In the '70s, Klemperer returned to his musical roots as a sometimes performer at the Metropolitan Opera, and as a lecturer/narrator for dozens of American symphony orchestras. Having spent most of his professional career chilling the audience's marrow as the archetypal Nazi officer, Werner Klemperer was the soul of geniality as the jovial narrator of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf at regional kiddie concerts of the '80s and '90s.

Trivia: American actor Bob Crane is best remembered for playing the crafty POW Col. Hogan on the 1960s television comedy Hogan's Heroes, but he also played leads in a few films during the '50s and '60s. Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He began his career as a drummer and played with dance bands and a symphony orchestra. He also worked as a radio announcer at various stations around the U.S. before hosting a morning talk show in Hollywood. Next Crane began appearing regularly on the Donna Reed Show. In 1978, he was mysteriously murdered, and the case remains unsolved. He was married to Sigrid Valdis, an actress.