A James Bond Trivia--And Not So Trivial--Fact

I was inspired by a post by Mark Steyn yesterday about the latest James Bond film. At the end of the post, Steyn offers a trivia question--which reminded me of my favorite (and only) James Bond trivia fact:

Name the actor who played the villian in 2 movies based on Ian Fleming novels.
The answer: Gert Frobe, who played Goldfinger in the James Bond movie and Baron Bomburst in Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I didn't know the name of the character Frobe played in the second movie, so I looked it up on Wikipedia--and found out something unexpected that led me to this item in Frobe's obituary in The New York Times:

In 1965, Mr. Frobe made headlines when he was quoted by the British newspaper The Daily Mail as saying: ''Naturally I was a Nazi.''

Mr. Frobe denied making the comment. ''What I told an English reporter during an interview,'' he said, ''was that during the Third Reich I had the luck to be able to help two Jewish people, although I was a member of the Nazi party.''

Israel banned Mr. Frobe's films for several months until a Jew, Mario Blumenau, informed the Israeli Embassy in Vienna that his life and his mother's had probably been saved when Mr. Frobe hid them from the Nazis.

I suppose that considering Frobe's Nazi membership, his rescue of 2 Jews offers his fans...a quantum of solace.

Technorati Tag: Gert Frobe.