Spoiler : Born in Stettin, Germany 3/5/1900; died 1/25/2002 of cancer at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. Magner began his career at age eighteen in the Hamburg Chamber Theater. Fleeing Nazism, he moved to Vienna, Austria in 1933, and for the next three years he worked there, in Breslau, Poland, and Prague, Czechoslovakia. With further threats of Nazism, he moved to America in 1936. He settled in Chicago where he taught at the Northwestern University, directed opera, soon settling into a quarter-century of working as a producer, director and writer for radio and television. He worked for NBC during the 1940s, then CBS in New York from 1950 until in 1965 when mandatory retirement forced him from the network. He moved to Los Angeles, working as the artistic director for the Inglewood Playhouse, later his own New Theater, Inc., which worked closely with the Goethe Institute of Los Angeles.

Spoiler : Director for radio programs including the NBC soap, Lone Journey (1940-1946). Director for television programs including Robert Montgomery Presents on NBC (1950); Studio One on CBS (1950-1958).

Spoiler : Awarded a Lifetime achievement award in 1989 by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle. For his 99th birthday in 1999, Magner did what he liked to do every birthday. He directed and produced a challenging play. That year, it was "The Envoy," tackling the prickly subject of just how neutral Switzerland was during WWII.