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Actor and musician Theodore Bikel passed away yesterday of natural causes at the age of 91. Bikel is best known for playing Tevye in the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof.
In addition to Fiddler on the Roof, Bikel also starred as Captain von Trapp in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music. The Austrian-born Bikel’s career spanned six decades and appeared in such films as The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn and The Defiant Ones with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. Bikel would receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Sheriff Max Muller. His TV credits include Law & Order, Murder, She Wrote,and Columbo. (In fact, I saw this Columbo episode a few weeks ago in which Bikel plays an accountant who is the president of a Mensa-like organization, which was fitting because Bikel himself was a member of Mensa. Although Bikel’s character was a genius and was one of the series’ more sympathetic killers, Columbo still got his man).
Bikel was also an accomplished folk musician and was one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival along with Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, George Wein, and Albert Grossman in 1959. While he wasn’t pleased with Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he didn’t like it when Dylan got booed off the stage.
A lifelong liberal activist, Bikel supported Democratic Party candidates going back to JFK. Bikel was critical of the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jews, became active in the Soviet Jewry movement and campaigned for their right to leave the USSR. However, in recent years, he supported the BDS movement against Israel by refusing to perform in the West Bank, although maintaining he was still a Zionist. Before the beginning of WWII, Bikel’s family fled from Austria to British Mandated Palestine, which eventually became Israel.
I’ll leave you with Bikel as everyone’s favorite Yiddish milkman singing “If I Were a Rich Man,” which you can watch and listen to in the video above this post.
