What Ever Happened to the Cast of ‘Hogan’s Heroes’

Bob Crane

Bob Crane famously starred as Colonel Robert E. Hogan. He received two Emmy nominations for his performance.

In 1968, Crane and Hogan co-stars Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin and John Banner appeared with Elke Sommer in a feature film, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, set in the divided city of Berlin during the Cold War.

After Hogan’s Heroes ended in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films: Superdad and Gus.

He also starred in a short-lived NBC series, The Bob Crane Show, in 1975 and stayed active in summer stock theater.

Crane married his high school sweetheart, Anne Terzian, in 1949. The couple had three children: Robert David, Deborah Anne, and Karen Leslie. 

However, Crane divorced Terzian in 1970, right before their 21st anniversary.

Years before their split, Crane began having an affair with Hogan co-star Cynthia Lynn, the actress who played Helga.

After Lynn left the show, she was replaced by Patricia Olson, who went by the stage name Sigrid Valdis.

Crane then became romantically involved with Valdis. The two tied the knot the same year he divorced Terzian. Crane and Valdis welcomed a son and later adopted a daughter.

In June 1978, between appearances at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Scottsdale, Ariz., Crane was bludgeoned to death. His murder remains unsolved. He was 49 when he died. 

Werner Klemperer

Werner Klemperer was best known for playing Colonel Wilhelm Klink. 

After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he began performing on the Broadway stage in 1947. Klemperer then appeared in several films during his early acting career such as The Wrong Man, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Houseboat. He also landed roles on television shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Perry Mason and Gunsmoke before his Hogan’s Heroes role.

When the role of Colonel Klink came along in 1965, he “was stunned when they said it was a comedy.”

“I made it very clear that if Klink was ever the hero, I would leave the show,” he once said.

Klemperer won two Emmys for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for his role in Hogan’s Heroes. 

Klemperer told PEOPLE in 1996, “I don’t see Hogan’s Heroes as a comedy. I see it as a satirical parody. We were parodying human weaknesses and strength.”

Years after the show ended, in the 1980s, Klemperer launched a second career as a narrator of live operas and concerts with major orchestras around the country.

In 1993, Klemperer reprised the role of Klink in an episode of The Simpsons as Homer’s guardian angel and spirit guide in the episode ‘The Last Temptation of Homer.’

Klemperer was the father of two children, Mark and Erika, with his second wife, Susan Dempsay. On the set of Hogan’s Heroes, he met his third wife, actress Louise Troy, who was making a guest appearance. They married in 1969 and divorced in 1975.

That same year, Klemperer met actress Kim Hamilton at an Actor’s Studio production in Manhattan. The two wed in 1997. They remained married until Klemperer died in 2000. He was 80.

John Banner

John Banner starred as Sergeant Schultz and frequently feigned ignorance of espionage activities with the catchphrase, “I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!”

As the series went on, the phrase changed to: “I know nothing, nothing!”

For his first acting job, Banner took a two-year contract tour that ended in Zurich, Switzerland. He was acting at Schauspielhaus when Hitler’s army moved into his homeland. After the Nazis annexed Austria during the 1938 Anschluss, Banner escaped by emigrating from Europe to the United States in 1939.

Banner joined a theater group of fellow refugees at the Music Box Theater in New York City. Even though he didn’t speak English, he was selected as master of ceremonies for the 1939 Broadway musical revue From Vienna.

Banner appeared in more than 40 feature films and made more than 70 television appearances between 1950 and 1970. 

After Hogan’s Heroes was cancelled in 1971, Banner starred in the short-lived sitcom, The Chicago Teddy Bears. His last acting appearance was in the March 17, 1972, episode of The Partridge Family. 

He then retired to France with his Paris-born second wife. He died of a burst abdominal aortic aneurysm hemorrhage when visiting his friends in Vienna in 1973 at the age of 63. 

Robert Clary

Robert Clary starred as Corporal LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes.

When he was a teenager, Clary and his family were taken to Auschwitz, where his parents were killed in a gas chamber on the day of their arrival, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Clary waited nearly four decades to speak publicly about his Holocaust experience. In the 2001 memoir, From the Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes, the actor revealed how starring in the sitcom helped him to talk about his time in the concentration camp.

“I had to explain that [Hogan’s Heroes] was about prisoners of war in a stalag, not a concentration camp, and although I did not want to diminish what soldiers went through during their internments, it was like night and day from what people endured in concentration camps,” he wrote, per THR.

In addition to Hogan’s Heroes, Clary starred on soap operas Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful, and The Young and the Restless.

He also appeared on the big screen in Ten Tall Men and Thief of Damascus, as well as on Broadway in New Faces of 1952 and Seventh Heaven.

Clary was married to Natalie Cantor, Eddie Cantor’s daughter, until her death in 1997. Clary died in 2022 at the age of 96. 

Richard Dawson

Richard Dawson’s comedy career took off in 1965 when he was cast as pick-pocketing prisoner of war Corporal Peter Newkirk in Hogan’s Heroes, a role he played until 1971.

Five years later, his television career took a turn when he landed a hosting gig on kin-against-kin competition Family Feud. He won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1978 for Best TV Game Show Host. The show’s initial run ended in 1985.

“I’m generally on the side of the contestant, and I don’t mind being blatant about it,” he told PEOPLE in 1994 when he returned to the game show for one season. “People think I’m being a smart-ass, a cynic, but I’ve always rooted for the underdog.”

Aside from his entertainment career — which included appearances on the ’70s Match Game and in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 hit, The Running Man — Dawson was a family man who met wife Gretchen Johnson while she was a Feud contestant.

The couple had one daughter together, Shannon, and he also had two sons, Mark and Gary, from his first marriage to actress Diana Dors.

Dawson died in 2012 at the age of 71.

Larry Hovis

After another actor backed out of the TV show, Larry Hovis was cast as Sgt. Andrew Carter, a POW in a German prison camp who was an expert on explosives.

In the mid-1970s, Hovis made appearances on the game show Match Game and the comedy series Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In alongside his Hogan’s Heroes castmate, Richard Dawson. Years later, he produced and was a regular panelist on the game show Liar’s Club. 

From 1979 to 1981, Hovis toured in the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas as Melvin P. Thorpe. Hovis teamed up with Gary Bernstein to form Bernstein-Hovis Productions, which produced game shows such as Anything for Money and the short-lived Yahtzee, a TV version of the dice game. 

Beginning in the 1990s, Hovis taught drama at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, which is now called Texas State University-San Marcos.

Hovis died in 2003. He was 67 years old.

Ivan Dixon

Dixon was best known for his role on Hogan’s Heroes as Sgt. James Kinchloe, a communications specialist who understood German. Dixon played Kinchloe from 1965 to 1970 and was the only member of the series’ longtime cast who did not stay for the entire series run.

Dixon was nominated for an Emmy for his performance in the TV movie The Final War of Olly Winter.

After Hogan’s Heroes, Dixon did some behind-the-camera work from 1970 to 1993, working as a television director on The Waltons, The Rockford Files, The Bionic Woman, Magnum, P.I. and The A-Team.

Dixon’s first feature film as director was the blaxploitation thriller Trouble Man.

In 1954, he married Berlie Ray. The couple had four children: Ivan IV, N’Gai Christopher, Alan Kimara Dixon, and Doris Nomathande Dixon.

Dixon died in 2008, at the age of 76.

Sigrid Valdis

Sigrid Valdis was best known for playing Hilda on Hogan’s Heroes. 

Valdis started her acting career in the late 1950s. She appeared in several television shows, including The Wild Wild West and Kraft Television Theatre. She appeared in one episode of Hogan’s Heroes as a different character before landing the role of Hilda, Colonel Klink’s secretary, replacing Cynthia Lynn, who played the role in the first season.

Her first marriage was to fashion businessman George Gilbert Ateyeh in 1958, with whom she had a daughter, Melissa. Ateyeh died in 1967. 

Valdis’ second marriage was to Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, and took place on the set of the series on October 16, 1970. Richard Dawson served as Crane’s best man. Following the birth of their son, Robert Scott Crane, in 1971, Valdis retired from acting.

In 1998, she joined the cast of her son’s syndicated weekly sketch comedy radio show, Shaken, Not Stirred.

She had three stepchildren from Bob’s earlier marriage to Anne Terzian: Karen, Deborah, and Robert David Crane.

Valdis died in 2007 at the age of 72. 

Cynthia Lynn

Born Zinta Valda Zimilis in Riga, Latvia, Cynthia Lynn came to the U.S. with her family after World War II.

Lynn played Colonel Klink’s secretary, Fraulein Helga, during the first season and returned for a few appearances later in the series’ run.

She also appeared in Surfside 6, Dr. Kildare, Mission: Impossible, The Odd Couple and The Six Million Dollar Man. Her last role was reportedly in 1975 on an episode of Harry O.

On the big screen, she co-starred with Marlon Brando in 1965’s Bedtime Story. According to the Hollywood Reporter, after Brando’s death in 2004, Lynn’s daughter, Lisa Brando, publicly claimed that Brando was her father.

Lynn died in 2014 at the age of 76.