Englishman Alan Lyle-Smythe was born in 1914. The future film and TV writer-actor trained as an actor before serving for four years with the Palestine Police in the 1930s. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the British Army; part of their Intelligence Corps, he operated behind enemy lines in Libya and Tunisia, escaped a firing squad execution and worked with guerrillas in Yugoslavia. ("Alan Caillou" was one of Lyle-Smythe's many wartime aliases; thinking it lucky, he took it in real life.) After the war, he was a police chief in Ethiopia, a district officer in Somalia and the founder of a theatrical company in Africa. Returning to the old prefessions of acting and writing, Caillou worked in Canadian TV in the 1950s and later relocated to Hollywood, where his became a familiar name in the credits of movies and TV series.