Leon Askin

Leon Askin

Austrian actor Leon Askin began his stage career in Germany, then left Europe as abruptly as possible when Hitler came to power. He reactivated his career in New York in 1940, becoming an American citizen three years later. In 1952, Askin made his first Hollywood film, Assignment Paris; though not quite as heavy or menacing-looking as he'd be in the 1960s, the actor was typecast from his first movie as a villain, usually fascist. One of his best early film roles was in Road to Bali (1953), a Hope-Crosby farce in which he played a South Seas witch doctor named Ramayana. Askin later appeared in Danny Kaye's Knock on Wood (1954), this time (typically) cast as a trenchcoated Teutonic spy. More of Askin's "shifty foreigner" characterizations could be enjoyed in The Bowery Boys' Spy Chasers (1955), Billy Wilder's One Two Three (1961), and the notorious political sex farce John Goldfarb Please Come Home (1964), in which the actor played a turbaned arab. As a Nazi officer (surprise, surprise) in What Did You Do In the War, Daddy?, Askin dropped dead in anticipation of an evening in bed with a pretty young Italian girl, whereupon the local underground was forced to tote his corpulent corpse all around town to hide the fact that he'd expired. Active in films and as a drama teacher and lecturer into the 1980s, Leon Askin is best known to American TV addicts as the gross (and gross-kopfed) SS officer Burkhalter on the 1960s sitcom Hogan's Heroes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide