Charles Fernley Fawcett (2 December 1915 – 3 February 2008) was an American adventurer, soldier, film actor, and a co-founder of the International Medical Corps.

[3] Having been orphaned at an early age, Fawcett and his younger brother and two sisters grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, in the care of their aunt.

The end of the affair made Fawcett contemplate suicide, and he left the United States in 1932 at age 16 to travel to the Far East, working his passage on a number of steamships with the U.S.

[3][5] By 1937, he had returned to America and stayed for a time in New York City before making his way to Washington D.C., where he was taken in by his cousin, who happened to be an assistant United States Postmaster General.

After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Fawcett joined the Polish Army but had been in barracks for only a week before escaping from the advancing Nazis and hitchhiking back to Paris.

[3][5] He was on his way to North Africa to join the French Resistance[3][5] when he heard about Varian Fry, who would go on to rescue over 2,000 Jews from Vichy France with the help of a handful of people, Fawcett among them.

In Paris, Fawcett took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners of war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans.

[3][5] By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the POWs out into the yard.

[3] In 1942, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot, flying the Hawker Hurricane but was invalided out that Christmas with tuberculosis, from which he had suffered as a youth.

[3][5] In 1949, Fawcett pursued a cinematic career, in which he performed in over 100 films, working with such stars as Errol Flynn, Alan Ladd and Robert Taylor.

[2] He combined this with smuggling refugees to safety from civil conflict, organizing earthquake relief teams, fighting in several wars and co-founding the International Medical Corps.