10 More War Movie Actors Who Were Actually There

Burt Lancaster was one of the greatest leading men to grace the big screen, and was a truly fascinating presence off it. Breaking out with his screen debut in 1946's The Killers, Lancaster became an icon of the noir and Western genres, with his most acclaimed and iconic turns coming in Sweet Smell of Success, From Here to Eternity, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral - all of which came in the 1950s.

However, while the fifties was the decade in which Lancaster reigned supreme, arguably the most interesting period of his career came in the 1960s. That decade gave us Lancaster's best Western (the criminally underseen The Professionals, directed by Richard Brooks), as well as gripping performances in Judgment at Nuremberg and The Swimmer. The sixties also marked the first of many collaborations with director John Frankenheimer, who in 1964 - and after collaborating on previous films The Young Savages, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Seven Days in May - directed Lancaster in the lead role of his new WWII picture, The Train.

The Train is one of the most artful and emotional WWII-set films ever made, with Lancaster playing the part of a French Resistance fighter attempting to stop a Nazi officer from plundering treasured artworks. Not one to miss, although I must add an obvious caveat for this specific list that Lancaster himself was not a member of the French Resistance. He did serve, but as a part of the USO, providing entertainment to U.S. servicemen fighting in Italy from 1943 through to 1945.

While most famed for his non-military acting roles, Lancaster did star in several other war pictures outside of The Train, including the Clark Gable-led Run Silent, Run Deep, as well as South Sea Woman, and Castle Keep.