Marcel Hillaire

Marcel Hillaire, born Erwin Ottmar Hiller on April 23, 1908 in Cologne, Germany, was a German‑born character actor whose long‑running career spanned stage, film and early American television. Coming from a distinguished artistic lineage—his grandfather Ferdinand Hiller was a celebrated pianist and music educator who had ties to Beethoven, Hummel and Mendelssohn—Hillaire was immersed in the arts from childhood, his father Paul Hiller serving as a prominent music critic for the Rheinische Zeitung. Though partly Jewish on both parental sides, he survived the Nazi era by repeatedly changing identities, first adopting the stage name Harry Fürster while touring wartime theater troupes, then working as a clerk for the Organization Todt under his birth name, a position that brought him perilously close to execution when his heritage was exposed in 1945. After the war he emigrated to the United States on June 15, 1948, and reinvented himself as a Frenchman, choosing the name Marcel Hillaire and presenting a fabricated Parisian origin that would become his public persona for the rest of his life. In New York he quickly found work portraying European characters, appearing in three episodes of Goodyear Playhouse, five of Lux Video Theatre and a guest spot on The Goldbergs by 1953, and he earned his first film credit as the French master chef in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954). Hillaire’s Broadway résumé includes the original cast of Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings (1955‑56) and the French comedy The Heavenly Twins. Relocating to Los Angeles, he became a ubiquitous fixture on television, guest‑starring in series such as The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and he played director Fritz in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (1969). In parallel with his screen work, Hillaire toured the country with a one‑man show called The Smile of France, delivering readings from classic French literature and historical love letters while insisting he was “the essence of all Frenchmen” and even claiming the title Le Bien‑Aimé du Peuple Français. He continued acting until shortly before his death in Los Angeles on January 1, 1988, leaving behind a legacy of versatile character work and a remarkable personal story of survival, reinvention, and devotion to theatrical art.