Of Jewish descent, Hillaire first evaded the Holocaust in Nazi Germany by adopting a stage name and moving around constantly in traveling theater troupes; later he brazenly entered the bureaucracy of the Todt under his birth name, narrowly avoiding execution after capture.

In American films, Hillaire played the French chef training Audrey Hepburn's eponymous Sabrina and was featured as Fritz the director in Woody Allen's mockumentary Take the Money and Run.

[3][4] Paul Hiller wrote for 24 years as the music critic of Cologne's Rheinische Zeitung, "reviewing over the course of a quarter century virtually every operatic and orchestral performance scheduled throughout the lower Rheinland.

Stationed in Brittany, Hiller rose to a position directly under the supervision of Albert Speer and in 1942 used his connections to attempt to bring his dying mother, still living in Cologne, to the comparative safety of France.

Sentenced to death for "his insidious deceit as much as his Semitic ancestry",[6] Hiller awaited execution in a Weimar jail, but was transferred to a Berlin prison to face six-year-old statutory rape charges made before the war by the mother of a teenaged admirer.

When Billy Wilder cast his 1954 Sabrina starring Audrey Hepburn, William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, Hillaire, in his first film role, was chosen to portray a French master chef.

[10][11] From the early 1950s to the 1980s, he played character parts in various TV shows, including The Twilight Zone (episodes "A Most Unusual Camera" and "The New Exhibit"), Lost in Space, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., McCloud and I Spy.