CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Actor Ivan Dixon, who brought the problems and promise of contemporary blacks to life in the film “Nothing But a Man” and portrayed the levelheaded POW Kinchloe in TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes,” died Sunday of complications from kidney failure, his daughter said. He was 76.
Dixon, who also directed scores of television shows, began his acting career in the late 1950s. He appeared on Broadway in William Saroyan’s 1957 “The Cave Dwellers” and in playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking 1959 drama of black life, “A Raisin in the Sun.”
In the latter, he played a Nigerian student visiting the United States, a role he repeated in the film version.
While not a hit, the 1964 “Nothing But a Man,” in which Dixon co- starred with Abbey Lincoln, also drew praise as a rare, early effort to bring the lives of black Americans to the big screen.
Other film credits included “Something of Value,” “A Patch of Blue” and the cult favorite “Car Wash.”
“As an actor, you had to be careful,” said Sidney Poitier, star of “A Patch of Blue” and a longtime friend. “He was quite likely to walk off with the scene.”
In 1967, Dixon starred in a CBS Playhouse drama, “The Final War of Olly Winter,” about a veteran of World War II and Korea who decided that Vietnam would be his final war. The role brought Dixon an Emmy nomination for best single performance by an actor.
He was probably best known for the role of Staff Sgt. James Kinchloe on “Hogan’s Heroes,” the hit 1960s sitcom set in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. The technically adept Kinchloe was in charge of electronic communications and could mimic German officers on the radio or phone.
Dixon was active in efforts to get better parts for blacks in movies and television, telling The New York Times in 1967: “Sponsors haven’t wanted anything negative connected with their products. We must convince them that the Negro is not negative.”
“Heretofore, people have thought that, to use a Negro, the story must pit black against white. Maybe we’re getting to the problems of human beings who happen to be black.”
Born in 1931 in New York, Dixon graduated in 1954 from North Carolina Central University in Durham.
In addition to his daughter, of Charlotte, survivors include his wife of 53 years, Berlie Dixon of Charlotte, and a son, Alan Kimara Dixon of Oakland.
Other Deaths
Vicki Van Meter, 26, who made headlines in the 1990s for piloting a plane across the country at age 11 and from the U.S. to Europe at age 12, died Saturday of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Crawford County, Pa., coroner said. Her body was found in her Meadville home Sunday.
Her brother said she battled depression, but her family thought she had been dealing with her problems.
Van Meter was celebrated in 1993 and 1994 when she made her cross- country and transatlantic flights accompanied only by a flight instructor.
Later, she earned a degree in criminal justice from Edinboro University in Pennsylvania and spent two years with the Peace Corps in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. She recently worked as an investigator for an insurance company.
Philip Jones Griffiths, 72, a photojournalist who spent years traveling across Vietnam to capture the effects of the war on its people, died Wednesday of cancer.
The former president of the Magnum photo agency was perhaps best known for his book “Vietnam Inc.” — described as one of the most detailed studies of any conflict.
In one of the book’s most haunting photos, he captured the image of a naked young boy cowering and covering his ears to drown out the sound of a passing U.S. helicopter. He wrote that the unnamed boy went mad after witnessing his mother killed by a helicopter gunship.
“If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn’t have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan,” linguist and author Noam Chomsky said of “Vietnam Inc.”
