40 Fun Facts About The Heroes of Telemark

Which Hollywood star, who played Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, leads The Heroes of Telemark?

Kirk Douglas plays Rolf Pedersen, who is content to sit out the war until the Norwegian resistance pulls him in.

Which animals featured in the code phrase the real saboteurs behind The Heroes of Telemark radioed to London?

Elephants, three pink ones, were the agreed reply to London's security question. The British had grown suspicious because the advance team landed in the wrong place and made contact late.

The director of The Heroes of Telemark had been fired from which Roman epic and replaced by Stanley Kubrick?

Spartacus dropped its first director within three weeks of shooting. Its star and producer promised he owed the man a film, and repaid the debt with The Heroes of Telemark.

Stranded in the Norwegian wilds, the real heroes of Telemark ate moss and lichen until they caught which animal?

Reindeer meat arrived just before Christmas 1942 for the four-man advance party. They had been waiting since October for a British raid that ended in disaster.

Which Irish actor, later Dumbledore in two Harry Potter films, plays Knut Straud in The Heroes of Telemark?

Richard Harris plays resistance leader Knut Straud, the man who pulls Rolf Pedersen into the fight. Harris had earned his first Oscar nomination for This Sporting Life.

What did Rjukan, the valley town in The Heroes of Telemark, put on a mountainside to end its sunless winters?

Giant mirrors on the northern slope have reflected the sun onto part of the town square since 2013. A tall mountain to the south blocks all direct sunlight from September to March.

After the real raid behind The Heroes of Telemark, five saboteurs skied 200 miles to safety in which country?

Sweden was neutral, and five of the raiders reached it cross-country while 3,000 German soldiers searched for them. Every one of the saboteurs got away.

Roy Dotrice, Jensen in The Heroes of Telemark, later set a world record narrating which fantasy saga's audiobooks?

A Song of Ice and Fire earned Dotrice the Guinness World Record for the most character voices by one person in an audiobook. On screen he was Leopold Mozart in Amadeus.

The Heroes of Telemark features a quisling, a word taken from a Norwegian politician's surname that means what?

A traitor is a quisling because Vidkun Quisling headed Norway's collaborationist regime under the Nazi occupation. He tried to seize power by radio broadcast as the invasion began.

What is Rolf Pedersen's job before the resistance recruits him in The Heroes of Telemark?

Physics professor Rolf Pedersen is content to wait out the war at first. Resistance leader Knut Straud changes his mind.

Which director of El Cid and the James Stewart western Winchester '73 made The Heroes of Telemark?

Anthony Mann made The Heroes of Telemark as his last completed film. He died in 1967 partway through shooting the spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic.

Which composer, an Oscar winner for The Bridge on the River Kwai, wrote the score for The Heroes of Telemark?

Malcolm Arnold scored The Heroes of Telemark late in a screen career of more than a hundred film scores. Away from cinema he wrote a cycle of nine symphonies.

In The Heroes of Telemark, how is Anna, the woman who joins the resistance effort, related to Rolf Pedersen?

His ex-wife Anna is drawn into the sabotage plot too, and working side by side reignites their relationship.

Location filming for The Heroes of Telemark in Norway was followed by studio work at which home of James Bond films?

Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire hosted the end of the shoot. The complex opened in 1936 and later became a base for the Star Wars and Marvel films as well.

In the ferry climax of The Heroes of Telemark, what does Rolf Pedersen invent to keep the children on board safe?

A lifejacket game gathers the children at the stern before the hidden charge goes off. Rolf boards only after spotting a comrade's widow and her child among the passengers.

Which star of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes plays the character known as Uncle in The Heroes of Telemark?

Michael Redgrave, credited simply as Uncle, belonged to the quartet with Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson that dominated the British stage in the mid-20th century.

Which actor, Messala in Ben-Hur, was first cast in The Heroes of Telemark and sued when the project stalled?

Stephen Boyd sued the director for half a million dollars after the funding fell apart in early 1964. He said the wait had cost him four good roles.

Which actress, the only woman with a speaking role in Zulu, plays Anna Pedersen in The Heroes of Telemark?

Ulla Jacobsson plays Anna, who is pulled into the resistance effort alongside Rolf. She had become internationally famous with One Summer of Happiness in 1951.

What was the working title of The Heroes of Telemark when the film was first announced in 1963?

The Unknown Battle was the name while other stars were attached to the project. The title changed after a new lead signed in July 1964.

Eric Porter plays which real Nazi official, the Reichskommissar for occupied Norway, in The Heroes of Telemark?

Josef Terboven ruled occupied Norway as Reichskommissar from 1940. A veteran of the Beer Hall Putsch, he had earlier been the Nazi party boss of Essen.

Which memoir by real saboteur Knut Haukelid was a main source for the screenplay of The Heroes of Telemark?

Skis Against the Atom came out in 1954. Its author, deputy commander of the plant raid, is the model for the film's resistance leader Knut Straud.

The Heroes of Telemark shows a British raiding party's plane shot down; what really carried the 1942 force to Norway?

Gliders towed by Halifax aircraft carried the Royal Engineers, and both crashed short of the landing zone. It was the first British airborne operation to use the Horsa.

Before lighting the fuses at Vemork, the real saboteurs stopped to help a Norwegian caretaker find which lost item?

His glasses mattered because new spectacles were almost impossible to obtain in wartime Norway. Only once they turned up did the raiders light the fuses.

The explosives that sank the real ferry in The Heroes of Telemark story were timed with which household items?

Alarm clocks served as the two fuses on the plastic explosive laid along the keel. The ferry went down in deep water soon after leaving the quay.

What was the code name of the 1943 commando raid on Vemork that inspired The Heroes of Telemark?

Operation Gunnerside took its name from a Yorkshire village where the chief of Britain's sabotage service went grouse shooting. Its advance party had been code-named Grouse.

What did the real Vemork raiders leave behind on purpose so the Germans would blame British forces, not locals?

A Thompson submachine gun was left at the scene in the hope of sparing the townspeople from German reprisals.

Just before Germany invaded Norway, which country's agents secretly removed Vemork's entire stock of heavy water?

France borrowed all 185 kg for the length of the war. The company's director agreed, remarking that he would probably be shot if Germany won.

The real ferry sinking dramatised in The Heroes of Telemark took place on which deep body of water in Norway?

Lake Tinn is about 460 metres deep, one of the deepest in Europe, and the film presents it as a fjord. The wreck of the ferry was not located until the early 1990s.

Knut Haukelid, the saboteur whose memoir inspired The Heroes of Telemark, was born in which New York City borough?

Brooklyn was home while his father worked as an engineer for a New York subway operator. The family returned to Norway in 1914, and his twin sister Sigrid Gurie became a Hollywood actress.

Which Norwegian commanded the 1943 Vemork raid and was its last surviving saboteur when he died aged 99?

Joachim Rønneberg was 23 when he led the team into the plant. A statue of him now stands near the harbour in his hometown of Ålesund.

What has the old Vemork power station, the target in The Heroes of Telemark, housed since 1988?

A workers' museum, the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum, fills the old station and tells the sabotage story. A newer power plant runs inside the mountain behind it.

How does heavy water, the substance fought over in The Heroes of Telemark, taste compared with tap water?

Sweeter, if only slightly: a 2021 study confirmed that people can taste the difference. A 1935 experiment had reported none at all.

The real heroes of Telemark hid for months on the Hardangervidda, which is what kind of landscape?

A high plateau, the largest of its kind in Europe, the Hardangervidda has a cold alpine climate all year. Much of it is now protected as a national park.

Which British bushcraft expert presented the BBC documentary The Real Heroes of Telemark?

Ray Mears focused on the survival skills that kept the saboteurs alive through a mountain winter. His companion book appeared in 2003.

Robert Krasker, who shot The Heroes of Telemark, won an Oscar for which Carol Reed thriller set in Vienna?

The Third Man won Krasker his Academy Award in 1951. An Australian, he was born in Egypt during a family trip and had his birth registered in Perth.

The Vemork plant attacked in The Heroes of Telemark made heavy water as a by-product of producing what?

Fertilizer was the business: Vemork's electricity was used to fix nitrogen, and when the station opened in 1911 it was the largest power plant in the world.

Heavy water, the prize in The Heroes of Telemark, is made with which heavier form of hydrogen?

Deuterium is roughly twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen, which makes heavy water about 10.6% denser than the regular kind.

How do Rolf Pedersen and Knut Straud first get from occupied Norway to Britain in The Heroes of Telemark?

On a hijacked steamer: the pair take over a passenger ship and force it to Britain. The episode echoes a real 1942 escape aboard the coastal vessel Galtesund.

What job was Norwegian heavy water meant to do inside the German reactor feared in The Heroes of Telemark?

Slow down neutrons: a moderator lets them be captured by other nuclei and keep a chain reaction going. Germany had wrongly ruled out graphite, which failed in tests only because of impurities.

Which secret British sabotage organisation, formed in 1940, trained the Norwegians who carried out the real Vemork raid?

The SOE, or Special Operations Executive, ran the saboteurs through its Norwegian unit, Kompani Linge. The organisation employed or controlled more than 13,000 people.