Theodore Bikel

Theodore Meir Bikel (/bɪˈkɛl/ bih-KEL; May 2, 1924 – July 21, 2015) was an Austrian-American actor, singer, and political activist.

He made his stage debut in Tevye the Milkman in Mandatory Palestine, where he lived as a teenager. He later studied acting at Britain's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and made his London stage debut in 1948 and in New York in 1955. He was also a widely recognized and recorded folk singer and guitarist. In 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival, and created the role of Captain von Trapp opposite Mary Martin as Maria in the original Broadway production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. In 1969, Bikel began acting and singing on stage as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The production won nine Tony Awards, and was one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history.

He also appeared in films, including The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Kidnappers (1953), The Enemy Below (1957), I Want to Live! (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), and 200 Motels (1971). For his portrayal of Sheriff Max Muller in The Defiant Ones (1958), he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Bikel was president of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America until 2014, and was president of Actors' Equity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He served as the chairman of the board of directors of Partners for Zionist Israel, where he also lectured.

Theodore Bikel was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, the son of Miriam (née Riegler) and Josef Bikel, from Bukovina. As an active Zionist, his father named him after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Following the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Bikel's family fled to Palestine, where his father's contacts helped the family obtain British passports. Bikel studied at the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school and joined Kibbutz Kfar HaMaccabi.

Bikel started acting while in his teens. He performed with Habimah Theatre in 1943, and was one of the founding members of the Cameri Theatre, which became a leading Israeli theatre company. He described his acting experience there as similar to, if not better than, the method acting techniques taught at the Actors Studio in New York. "The Habimah people were much closer to the Method, indeed, than Lee Strasberg was, because they were direct disciples of Stanislavski."

In 1945, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Finding work almost immediately, from the mid 40s to the late 50s, Bikel appeared in a slew of British B-movies, and the occasional 'A' film too, usually playing heavies and crooks of various European nationalities despite having perfected his English accent. He played the lead role in 1956 British film drama Flight from Vienna. Despite his success in the UK, the ever-ambitious Bikel travelled to the States in 1954 to pursue his career in the more lucrative Hollywood movie industry and on Broadway, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1961.

Bikel did not return to live in Palestine, nor did he take part in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Bikel wrote in his autobiography, Theo: "A few of my contemporaries regarded [not returning to Palestine] as a character flaw, if not a downright act of desertion. In me there remains a small, still voice that asks whether I can ever fully acquit myself in my own mind."