Theodore Bikel
BORN VIENNA, MAY 2, 1924. DIED JULY 20, 2015, AGED 91
TO SOME he was the ultimate Tevye. The AustrianAmerican Jewish actor, folk singer and political activist Theodore Bikel made his stage debut in Sholem Aleichem’s classic Tevye the Milkman in Tel Aviv with the Habimah Theatre while still a teenager. Yet he was to reprise the role in the musical Fiddler on the Roof in America some 2,100 times in over 42 years. This exceeded the number performed by any other actor, including Chaim Topol — who starred in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film — and became seminally identified with the part.
Some critics considered Bikel’s interpretation a simpler and more authentic version, closer to the original story of life for 19th century East European Jews. Bikel actually based the role on his own grandfather, who betrayed all the hallmarks of the God-fearing, God-lambasting, angst- laden, embattled milkman berating his daughters for defying him. Bikel described his grandfather as pious, irreverent, contradictory and irascible. “He didn’t just talk to God,” he said in one aside. “He went one step further and stopped talking to God.”
The 1969 performance of Bikel’s Fiddler won nine Tony Awards and became one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history. But if Sholem Aleichem had Bikel hooked, his debut was not launched as Tevye but as the Tsarist constable in the Habimah production. Bikel considered the successful musical as charming but “shtetl lite”. In his one-man show Sholem Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears (2008) and in a documentary last year, Theodore Bikel: In the Shoes of Sholem Aleichem, he introduced a sense of tragedy and realism, reflecting the writer’s literary depths. Sholem Aleichem was frequently referred to as the “Jewish Mark Twain”, and Twain responded by sayng: “Please tell him that I am the American Sholem Aleichem”.
The son of Miriam née Riegler and Josef Bikel, an insurance agent, from Bukovina, he was named by his Zionist father for Theodor Herzl. It was there, from their second-floor flat in Vienna that his father read him the Tevye stories that inspired him. But following the Anschluss in 1938, the family left for Mandatory Palestine where Josef’s connections helped them secure British passports, and he became director of the public health service. The young Bikel spent most of his teenage years on kibbutz before joining Habimah.
Bikel’s heavyb e a r d e d E a s t E u r o p e a n demeanour and his rich, seduct i v e b a r i t o n e v o i c e s u i t e d many l e a di ng supporting roles involving character acting.
He played a Russian captain, a U-boat officer,andhisTVrolesinmanyepisodes were legion, from Mission Impossible to Star Trek. He launched his film career in The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in 1951, and nearly 40 roles followed, some of them major support roles in character parts. In My Fair Lady he played the Hungarian phoneticist Zoltan Karpathy.
Reflecting on his early acting career with the Habimah and later with the Cameri Theatre, which he co-founded, BikelfoundcomparisonsbetweenHabimah and the Method school of acting.
Bikel left Israel for London’s Rada in 1945. One year later Michael Redgrave talent-spotted him, and introduced him to Sir Laurence Olivier, then directing the first UK production of A Streetcar Named Desire; Bikel appeared in it as Mitch and was critically acclaimed. Eventually he went to the USA and was naturalised in 1961.
He created the role of Captain von TrappintheBroadwayshow The Sound of Music (1959-63). Ironically for the Viennaborn refugee fleeing his native Austria, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the Captain’s much loved valedictory song to his homeland, Edelweiss, which Bikel duly delivered, accompanying himself on the guitar.
The actor portrayed East Europeans in many TV series including Ironside and Charlie’s Angels. From 1955 he also recorded Jewish and Russian folk songs on acoustic guitar. In 1959 he co-founded the Newport Folk festival, often appearing with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others. Unusually for even the greatest actor, Bikel rarely had a day without work during the course of his 60-year career.
His operatic voice suited roles in Rossini’s Thieving Magpie, Mozart’s Il Seraglio, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, among others.
Bikel was also a civil rights activist, frequently performing in support of the Democratic Party, and the Jewish and Yiddish interests close to his heart. Although not unreserved in his support for Israel, he sparred with Vanessa Redgrave who called for the state’s military overthrow.
Bikel was an active president of the Actors’ Equity and several other US artistic bodies, including President Carter’s National Council for the Arts.
He was briefly married to Ofra Ichilov in 1942; following their divorce, he married Rita Weinberg Call, with whom he had two children. When they divorced he married the conductor Tamara Brooks who died in 2012. He is survived by his fourth wife, Aimee Ginsburg, his sons Robert and Daniel and three grandchildren.
‘He promoted Jewish and Yiddish interests and fought for civil rights’