Processing ISO-8859-1 characters in forms

I have some characters in the upper part of the ISO-8859-1 table that appear in some of my input forms, but when they reach the action class, the characters do not get translated correctly. The & and characters in the lower part of the table seem to translate correctly, but characters like the acute e, and grave e, etc. don't translate.

Does anyone have any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks - Bob