During World War II, Hollywood looked for cruel-visaged actors to play Nazi characters that were cruel-looking and who could accomplish evil with chilling efficiency. With his Aryan poster boy looks and German accent, Peter van Eyck became Hollywood’s favorite on-screen Nazi. The irony is that, in real life, the German-born van Eyck was a fervent anti-fascist who had fled just before Hitler took power.
Van Eyck bobbed around the world doing odd jobs until he landed in New York and befriended Aaron Copland, Irving Berlin and, finally, Billy Wilder. Van Eyck’s first attention-grabbing performance was in Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, which airs tomorrow night on Turner Classic Movies.
His role as Lt. Schwegler in Five Graves to Cairo is embedded in a sequence of nine straight German soldier movie roles during 1943-44. Sometimes his roles didn’t even have names – “German officer”, “SS Captain”, “Gestapo”.
Back to real life – van Eyck served as a film officer in the US Army’s occupation of post-Germany. Returning to Hollywood, his roles diversified to the point that he was only playing a German officer about half the time. He ended up with 94 screen credits on IMDb, including high-ranking Wehrmacht officers in The Longest Day (1962) and The Bridge at Remagen (his final film in 1969). One of Van Eyck’s most notable roles is as one of the drivers in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s hyper-suspenseful The Wages of Fear.
It is said that acting is pretending. Typecast by looks and accent, van Eyck was a refugee who happened into a prolific acting career – playing exactly what he wasn’t.
