Marcel Hillaire

Marcel was another scene-stealing character actor who came to the fore during the early years of television. He built a 40-year long career in Hollywood playing the archetypal French gendarme, maître d' or small time crook. In fact, the balding, steely-eyed little actor was born in Cologne (Germany) as Erwin Ottmar Hiller, the son of music journalist and opera singer Paul Hiller. He appeared first on stage under the name Harry Furster in order to disguise his Jewish ancestry but was eventually put in jail by the Nazis, somehow escaped, then made his way to America. He began to act in television from 1952, subsequently appearing on the Broadway stage in "The Heavenly Twins", followed by "Silk Stockings" three years later. From then on, he quickly settled on his French impersonations which would become his stock-in-trade. Marcel excelled in comical portrayals of stereotypical characters. He was memorably larger-than-life in his first motion picture, the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954) as 'the professor' who vainly attempts to teach budding cordon bleu chef Audrey Hepburn how to break an egg. During most of the 1960s Marcel worked on the MGM lot European section where he was especially active in the spy spoof genre, notably The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), Get Smart (1965) and I Spy (1965), often as well-meaning, but bumbling secret agents. He was also popularly employed in science fiction, appearing twice on The Twilight Zone (1959) and at the beginning and end of the third season of Lost in Space (1965), as two different characters. One of Marcel's quirkiest caricatures was that of 'Fritz' , from the brilliantly inventive Woody Allen comedy Take the Money and Run (1969). 'Fritz' was the once-famous German film director hired by would-be bank robber Virgil Starkwell (Allen) to shoot a scene of a bank heist as a cover for the real bank job (eventually frustrated by a rival gang getting in on the act). Marcel played the part -- in what was arguably one of the funniest scenes in the film -- with a jaundiced eye towards the behavioral idiosyncrasies of real-life German director Fritz Lang. For the next decade, Marcel continued to appear on the small screen though he rarely had the same opportunities to shine that he did in the swinging 60's. Never married, he spent his remaining life in Los Angeles, where he died during complications from surgery in January 1988, aged 79.