Theodore Meir Bikel ( 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 Israel, 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."
In 1948, Michael Redgrave recommended Bikel to his friend Laurence Olivier as understudy for the parts of both Stanley Kowalski and Harold "Mitch" Mitchell in the West End theatre district premiere of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in London. Aside from being an understudy, Bikel's main role in the production was the relatively minor part of Pablo Gonzales. He graduated from supporting actor and understudy, though, to star opposite the director's wife, Vivien Leigh, with a sudden, unplanned performance when a co-star, playing the role of Mitch, came down with a minor illness. Bikel showed up backstage and went directly to Leigh's dressing room to ask if she wanted to rehearse with him, to make sure he was right for the role. She replied that she did not need to: "Go and do it," she said. "You are a professional, and Larry gave you this job because he trusted you to do it well." After the show, Leigh told him, "Well done."
For most of his acting career, he was known for his versatility in playing characters of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds; he claimed he took on those different personalities so his acting would "never get stale". On television, he played an Armenian merchant on Ironside, a Polish professor on Charlie's Angels, a tyrannical American law school professor on The Paper Chase (television version of the earlier feature film The Paper Chase (1973), starring John Houseman as Professor Kingsley), a Bulgarian villain on Falcon Crest, a Belarusian on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and an Italian on Murder, She Wrote.
In movies, he played an Imperial German naval gunboat officer in the First World War in The African Queen (1951) opposite Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and in the World War II combat film on a Nazi German U-boat / submarine in The Enemy Below (1957) starring Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens, a Southern "redneck" sheriff chasing two chained escaped convicts Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, and a Russian submarine captain whose boat gets grounded on the beach near the rural village on Gloucester Island of the New England rocky coast causing residents to panic of a threatening Russian Soviet Union / Red Navy invasion in the Cold War era comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!!! (1966), along with Alan Arkin, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters and Carl Reiner. He also portrayed the sadistic General Jouvet in The Pride and the Passion (1957), and was screen tested for the role of Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964), though the part ultimately went to German actor Gert Fröbe. In My Fair Lady (1964), he played the overbearing Hungarian linguist Zoltan Karpathy.
He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in Tonight in Samarkand, and in 1958 was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for The Rope Dancers. In 1959, he created the role of Austria-Hungary Empire naval Captain von Trapp in the original stage musical production of The Sound of Music, which earned him a second "Tony" nomination. Bikel did not like his role because his ability to sing was underused; neither did he enjoy performing the role of the captain repeatedly. When the famous longtime musical composers Rodgers and Hammerstein realized Bikel was an accomplished folk singer, they wrote the song "Edelweiss" (purporting within the story to be an Austrian folk song) specifically for him to sing and accompany himself on the guitar.
In 1964, he played Zoltan Karpathy, the dialect expert, in the film version of My Fair Lady. Since his first appearance as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1967), Bikel had performed the role more often than any other actor (over 2,000 times). When an injury required 74-year-old fellow Israeli performer Chaim Topol (veteran of many productions of the stage show and star of the later 1967 motion picture version) to withdraw from a high-budget, much-promoted 2009 North American tour of the revival musical, Bikel substituted for him in several appearances in 2010.
Bikel was a guest star on many popular television series in the 1950s (often called the first "Golden Age of Television"). He appeared in an episode of the 1954 NBC legal drama Justice based on cases from the Legal Aid Society of New York. He also appeared in the episode entitled "The Faithful Pilgrimage" of CBS's Appointment with Adventure anthology series. That particular episode was written by Rod Serling. He also appeared in a second episode of Appointment with Adventure entitled "Return of the Stranger". Bikel also appeared in an acting role in Frank Zappa's experimental film 200 Motels (1971).