[1] His best-known performances are perhaps the German pilot in Mrs. Miniver and the desperate Bulgarian refugee in Casablanca, who tries gambling to obtain travel visa money for himself and his wife.

According to one obituary, "He specialized in portrayals of Nazis, sometimes as the handsome but icy SS sadist battling Allied heroes, sometimes as a sympathetic German soldier forced, against his better judgment, to fight".

He began his U.S. acting career at the Pasadena Playhouse, while running two gas stations in order to pay his expenses.

[5] The studio kept him busy with roles in the World War II films, The Pied Piper (1942), Desperate Journey (1942) fighting Errol Flynn, and The Navy Comes Through (1942).

He had a sympathetic role in Casablanca (1942), as a young refugee trying and failing to earn money via gambling in order to purchase travel visas for him and his wife; he is helped by Humphrey Bogart.

Dantine's good looks caused him to receive a lot of fan mail and, in the words of one profile, "the studio began to realize it had something else besides a Hollywood Hitlerite on its hands.

"[4] Warners announced they had bought Night Action by Norman Krasna as a vehicle for Dantine,[6] but the film appears not to have been made.

In 1947, he co-starred with Tallulah Bankhead in the Broadway play The Eagle Has Two Heads, replacing Marlon Brando.

He had the lead in a B-movie, Guerrilla Girl (1953), then had a small role in the musical, Call Me Madam (1953), He was supported by Patricia Neal while starring in the British science fiction film Stranger from Venus (1953).

Dantine acted in the 1956 film production of Tolstoy's War and Peace as Dolokhov, a Cossack officer assigned to harrying the retreat of France's Napoleonic army from Moscow.

Among Dantine's later screen appearances, there were three films for which he was the executive producer: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and The Killer Elite (1975), both directed by Sam Peckinpah, and The Wilby Conspiracy (1975).